Even Adam had a first, failed marriage. Before there was Eve, there was Lilith. Brought into creation not from Adam’s rib, but from the same earthly dust that bore the first man himself.
Lilith and Adam were equals.
Meant to keep each other company, the couple soon began to quarrel. Lilith refused to meekly perform her wifely duties and lie under Adam during sex, insisting that she be treated equally in the partnership in recognition of her equal substance. So, rather than wasting effort and money in lengthy divorce proceedings, Lilith simply uttered the ineffable name of God and vanished.
Adam, perhaps realizing the error of his ways (and perhaps just a bit lonely), pleaded with God, who sent three angels to seek out Adam’s missing wife. When they eventually found Lilith — no doubt lounging with Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me” by the Red Sea — she refused to return to Eden, having decided that her new purpose was to devour children. Supposedly she even fucked one of the angels, but that might just be rumor.
Photo: Hogtied.com
Thus, the legend of Lilith began. In the time and texts that follow, she blossoms into a seductress, a serpent-demon driven by chaos, lust, and licentiousness.
Lilith’s breasts are filled with poison instead of milk. Her hair is the first gold. She’s a full-busted winged monster that flies across the desert, the only landscape bare and wild enough to match her. Her nighttime visits are even said to cause wet dreams, and she uses the emissions to impregnate herself with baby demons. Which is the most badass thing I’ve ever heard.
Lilith threatens the patriarchy through her embodiment of feminine power, independence, vengeance, baseness, triumph, rage: all of my favorite things to think about during sex. Hence, the name.
Chosen out of necessity — for safety, for privacy — but also to allow a distance between myself and the character I play at work, Lilith Luxe.
I grew up in the desert too. Surrounded by flatness and nothing, flatness and everything. That’s what people don’t realize about the desert, it teems with creation. Life elbows its way through the biological bus queue to arrive, miraculously, from a pile of sand. Consider that. A womb of impossibly tiny rocks.
Both of my parents are botanists by training. I cut my teeth as the first diapered field researcher, accompanying my parents on long road trips through New Mexico to gather plant specimens as a toddler. I could tell you all the different oak trees native to Texas. I could, once.
But I, too, uttered an ineffable name and vanished. Not the name of God, but the name of possibility. The name of freedom. A name pronounced, “if you won’t, I will.” A name like Lilith.
Photo: Hogtied.com
My parents do not know this name. It is a name replete with the same triumph and struggle of a thriving desert plant — which I hope would make them proud, but I don’t count on it.
There’s nothing my parents did wrong that made me a sex worker. I am happy here, I put myself here, and I am incredibly proud of the hard work that it took. Still, I am afraid they will see only Lilith when they look at me.
I am afraid that my little brother’s friends will find out and tease him mercilessly about his sister, the whore. I am afraid that the next time I apply for a documentary film fellowship, they’ll google me and cancel before the interview. I am afraid that when I share this article on Twitter, someone I know will find it and call my grandmother. I am afraid because the last time I told someone I performed in porn, he looked at me and said, “but you look more like a librarian,” then asked me for tips on hooking up with girls.
If I tell them, they’ll see only Lilith, but if I don’t, they’ll forever see a ghost. A former daughter that doesn’t exist anymore.
They are witness to a fraught Lilith still fighting with herself about whether or not to break-up with Adam. On the one hand, there’s comfort and familiarity. With Adam, Lilith has a home, the love of a partner, and the approval of God. On the other hand, there’s freedom.
Oh, and I chose the surname Luxe because it sounded really filthy, really porn-y.
And I like that.
