It all started with my boobs

Welcome to the 1st Episode  of The Dick Den. On this episode  I share how I got into sex work, my breast cancer journey and talk lot about my boobies!

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Instagram: @lewd.and.loud
Website: https://thedickden.buzzsprout.com/
Email: thedickden.lewd@gmail.com

Transcript

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Welcome to the Dick Den podcast. It is about to get weird. My friends. I'm your loud host, Rachel z Lingam, masseuse, sex educator, breast cancer, thriver, funny gal sitting in a room full of dicks talking dicks butts and all things sex. This is something I have been thinking about, dreaming about, talking about for a while now, and here we are. before we get into it, I wanna say happy birthday mom. You are the best hype woman when you bring an inflatable penis suit on vacation. Yes, I did that and honestly, don't travel without one now even took one to Burning Man. On this episode, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about me, who I am and how the hell I got here. It all started with my boobies. I was second, third grade maybe, I was sprouting the titties. I grew up in a neighborhood full of boys who were relentless about this new development always popping my bra straps. Early on I was embarrassed by the development of breast and was always trying to cover them up. I was not a fan of becoming the early bloomer. How was IDA know as a young girl that they would turn into this force to be reckoned with? Throughout my adult life, the older I got, the bigger my boobs got as a teenager. Absolutely wormed my way into adult swim time at the local pool, because let's face it, I looked a lot older than I was throughout my adult life. My boobs continued to become this magical, very visible cloak that allowed me to skip lines, smuggle, drinks, snacks, and all kinds of things. Brawl became a pocket for my ID as I got older and started going to bars. It's safe to say that I fucking loved those gals. Such a ju drastic turn from how I felt about their initial appearance in my life. Now I learned about sex the way that most people do not through quality sex education, and absolutely not through honest and open conversations because no, hell no. Why would we do that? Why on earth would we talk honestly about the most intimate thing that we can do with another person? Nope. My sexual education came through peers and porn, dirty magazines and v h s porn. I knew where to find it, whether that was at my grandparents' house, my neighbor's dad had a stash and. I was drawn to the images that I saw. This was like really my first time seeing sex secretly. I think I always wanted to be a porn star. I mean, my titties were made for it. I didn't become an porn star, but instead I got into the service industry. If you have ever worked in a bar or a restaurant, you are very well aware of the type of shenanigans that go down there. It was the. Best possible environment for my inappropriate sense of humor. I quickly became popular, very popular with the credit card swipe. I was swiping bums left and right. The cooks, they loved it. Now looking back, this probably should have been an early indication that way more men than you think are interested in, but stuff, but. They loved it. They could not wait. When a new guy started for the unexpected swipe, they would constantly come running to me and tell me, new guy, new guy, do the thing. Do the thing. Rachel. Rachel. So, Now, same restaurant I also took to the habit of drawing wieners inside the. Regulars to-go boxes. They would get home, open their to-go box and find a little wiener. Surprise. This habit followed me into my next job at a building supply company, a place full of men, another place where my inappropriate humor and ridiculousness really began to thrive. I hid wiener's drawings everywhere there. Honestly, I guess I've always been that wiener drawn bitch will be, cuz I still do it today. Every opportunity I get now I know what you're thinking. She is an. HR nightmare and you are not wrong, my friends. So it's really no surprise to me that I became really interested in the adult industry. My first introduction to sex work. Was through camming. Now, this was long before Chatter bait and only fans think more like AOL Chat times. The first camming job I ever had, I worked in a studio and I used that term so loosely. It was literally an office with some day beds and some big old computers. He logged in, lured the peeps in and did your thing. I quickly got bored of dildo ing myself on CAM and all the typing, whatnot. It just ruined the mood for me. I tried stripping, not my thing. I remember seeing an ad in the back of a pitch weekly for escorts, and I figured, fuck it. Why not try in-person sex? Quickly. I became a Lady of the night and I, you know what? I loved it. It was fun. I found sex work to be really empowering. It was sex on my terms. I loved being the center of attention. I was starting to get really good at weenies and yeah, I felt really empowered by. Now, even though I worked in the sex industry off and on between my twenties and thirties, it was never something that I considered to be a full-time career for myself. It was always something that I would just kind of dabble in here and there. I knew that I liked it and I could always go back to it if I wanted to. in my thirties, I was working at this bar. I loved this bar. I've always found that the service industry and bar life really suited me. It was right after New Year's I was 35. We had this terrible flock of seagulls cover band on New Year's. I always secretly blamed them for what happens next, even though. A band did not cause that I am not ridiculous I felt a lump in my boob in the shower, and I didn't know anything about self breast exams or breast cancer. Everything I knew about cancer I had seen on TV and in movie. Like so many people do, I absolutely chalked it up to an injury. I thought, you know, maybe it was from moving kegs or carrying all the ice. I let it go for a couple weeks. It did not resolve on its own. Next thing you know, I'm getting a mammogram, an ultrasound, and a biopsy. Between the biopsy and the diagnosis, there's this waiting period, right? And people would say the most well-intentioned things like, you are so young and that's not going to happen to you, and you are such a good person. But the reality of breast cancer happening was starting to become really. I will never forget the day I was at work. My doctor's office called me. Next thing I know I'm showing up there, the first words out of her mouth were, you're such a young thing, and then immediately followed by a breast cancer diagnosis. I was 35 cancer is one of those things that nobody really thinks is going to happen to them, but absolutely not. As a young adult, I was reeling from. Like the idea, like my boobs, this sounds so vain, but my boobs had played such an important part of my life and they weren't absolutely my favorite feature physically of myself, that I was really kind of freaked out by the fact that now they were trying to kill me. I was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, which has a pretty high risk rate for recurrence. I started chemo. Instantly my hair fell out. I was bald. I looked like a baby eagle. I did rock a pretty hot GI Jane look, but I was bald. Treatment went pretty well for me. I was pretty lucky in regards to the fact that I didn't have a lot of negative chemo after effects. But really what struck me the most is this sense that everything feminine. Was just being ripped away from me, my hair, my breast, and I was really struggling for the first time ever in my life with my sexual self, my body image, and how I felt about myself. I thought back to all the times that I had dabbled in the sex work industry and how sexually empowered and great I felt in my body I tossed the idea around like, is it ridiculous to be going through cancer treatment and also reentering the sex work world? But nonetheless, I did. I was pretty nervous about it initially. Like I didn't know how clients were going to react to the wig or the. port the scars. Initially I had a lumpectomy, which is a just a surgery to remove the lump in my breast before starting chemo. So my boobs were still intact, and I thought, why not give them a very great farewell tour? I wanted them to be seen and admired by all these people. I wanted them to live their best titty in life while they still could. Now, of course, the money did not hurt because I was unemployed and then this was very much a job that I could do when I felt like it. I didn't get back into sex work. Post-cancer diagnosis strictly for fiscal reasons. It was way more about the empowerment and how I felt about my body and really learning to love the changes that my body was going through. So I did that for a while a day, had this amazing last farewell tour. Then shortly, After I started chemo, it became obvious that I was going to need to start considering more treatment. Did I want to do radiation? Did I want to do a double mastectomy? What did that look like? The risk rate of recurrence was pretty high for me, so eventually I settled on the idea of having a double mastectomy. and breast reconstruction. This is such a personal choice, okay? I didn't for an instant not consider doing breast reconstruction because my titties had been such a big part of my life, and as a breast cancer thriver, we hate it when you say, oh, well, at least you got a free boob job. But I totally understand where that comes from because I thought that, like I really thought that I was going to have a double mastectomy and then get a free boob job, and I felt like my plastic surgeons really didn't do much to dissuade me from the idea that that's what was going to happen. I felt really unprepared for the way my body was going to change. Now sex work had been a pretty much constant in my life from my early twenties up until even right before I was getting ready to have a double mastectomy, even though it wasn't something I did full-time, it was always there after my mastectomy. is really when I started to struggle really hard with body image. My body looked crazy. I was not prepared for the way I was gonna look, the swelling, the multiple procedures. I wasn't prepared for the process and I felt really fucking uncomfortable in my. I really wanted to return to sex work, but I wasn't really sure how to do that because I wasn't comfortable showing so much of my body that I had relied so heavily on in the past. And that's where it all really started to turn. For the first time in my life, I started thinking like, Is sex work a viable career for me post-cancer body? And if so, how do I find a genre that fits in all the times I had done sex work before, I never really talked about it. I wasn't interested in the judgment of other people I would say that I was, I was scared of the judgment. It was definitely like something that I was maybe a little bit embarrassed by and had some shame around. So I kept it a dirty little secret, but all of that changed after breast cancer. Sex work, really post breast cancer really allowed me to learn to love my body again. I didn't do it in the traditional ways that I had done before. I stumbled upon my niche now Lingham massage as purely an accident. I would love to get into all the dets of how that happened, but that is a story for another day. The deeper and deeper that I got into sex work and the more sex work allowed me to learn to ReLove my body and rebuild my sexual confidence. That's when I started talking about it. I started talking really openly about the fact that I had been a sex worker and all the things that I had done and learned, and so much to my surprise, I wasn't met with judgment. Instead, I was met with intrigue people. had Questions. They wanted to know how to be better at masturbation or how to be better at in bed, how to give a better blowjob. I was really shocked once I started talking about it, the general lack of knowledge, a whole that needed to be filled, if you will, in most people's knowledge about sex, intimacy, and even their. Own anatomy. And that is really what inspired me to start down the route of sex education and to start this podcast. It's my mission to create an open and honest place where we can talk about. All things sex because let's face it, we want to be better at sex. We want to learn new things and we want to talk about this. We just don't have an opportunity to do so. So make sure to join me every single week as we break the stigma about talking about all things. Sex. Thank you so much for listening to me today. If you love this podcast, make sure to subscribe so that you never miss a story. Join me every Tuesday for more than just the tip.