Until recently, searching online for the terms ‘fuck like a goddess’ encountered articles teaching women how to be sexy and good in bed to please her lover or even to teach a man to make a woman feel like a goddess with his sexual prowess. These notions give the power to the man as the agent of pleasure. Now, thankfully, when you type those words into your search engine you will encounter transformational and erotic coach Alexandra Roxo’s book, “F*ck Like A Goddess,” instead, an empowering guide that offers sexual healing as a magical pathway to helping the self and the world.
Who doesn’t carry some hang-ups due to what we’ve been taught or experienced about sex? Roxo advocates that embracing every single part of yourself, good and bad, will unleash your full power not just in bed but in life. She wants to shift outdated and damaging cultural conditioning that has had endless negative effects on society, including internalized shame, privilege and racism. She also wants us to have mind-blowing orgasms like never before.
Roxo was raised with two opposing ideologies, one from her religious, Southern, U.S. family, which demanded “purity,” and the other from her Brazilian heritage, which encouraged sensuality and the polar opposite of body-shaming. Throughout her life, which she describes as full of glamorous adventures as well as traumas, she’s explored every kind of esoteric healing, from meditating in caves with monks to snake dancing and ayahuasca ceremonies. She’s been in films, created documentaries for Vice, embedded herself with truck stop prostitutes and rubbed elbows with celebrities. Through all that, she came to realize that fame, ambition, and capitalist ideas about success were not going to fulfill her. She decided to take her ideas about healing and wellness and coach others on their path, which ultimately led to writing this book.
“F*ck like A Goddess” is written in a casual, friendly tone. It’s full of her stories, addresses the patriarchy and systemic racism, and while it deals with heavy subjects, it’s also fun and uplifting, offering exercises to figure out what’s holding us down. The timing of the book’s release while we’re in a pandemic and forced to contend with ourselves in ways many of us avoid, seems incredibly relevant, so we pulled Roxo for a chat about the world.
When you were writing this book, where you talk about society being in a moment of change and awakening, could you have anticipated the degree of change that we are currently experiencing?
Not at the conscious level. Back in 2016, when the Black Lives Matter movement had an upsurge in response to some cases of police brutality that were really tragic, I remember being really deeply called to wake up in a certain way. And there have been certain moments around climate crisis where we’ve all been called to wake up. And all kinds of other reflections that things are out of balance, be it statistics around mental health, around women still battling eating disorders, or around children being sex-trafficked — these things have been close to my heart for many years.
The fact that there’s a pandemic and a resurgence of Black Lives Matter and hopefully a greater shift happening in America around race, it doesn’t feel far off from my book. I have whole chunks where I write ‘Hey, if you’re not already examining your privilege, if you’re not already tuned in to what’s happening with the earth or indigenous peoples, it’s time.’
In the greater external sociopolitical, there have been so many things brewing, just really now people can’t escape it. They can’t pretend it’s not there anymore. I’m so relieved actually. There has needed to be a wake-up where humanity realizes it’s way out of balance. And my book is really meant to be a guide for the internal work that’s necessary in the midst of these times of great transformation because the energy of creativity and sexuality is essentially very transformational and very potent and powerful. There’s been a great separation inside of us of those elements of our being. Sexuality or erotic nature, joy, dancing, feeling, grieving, to me it’s all interconnected as to how we wake up to the truth of our lives and the reality we live in.
So working out those things within you is necessary to change what’s going on outside ourselves?
There’s this old Greek axiom that says ‘As above so below.’ I do think there is a direct connection between our insides and our outsides. Owning the internal, actually not numbing out during these times, and noticing where we’ve avoided ourselves or our pasts or our pain personally and collectively – that feels very important. There is a direct correlation between our own personal healing and awakening and reclaiming of power and the greater sense of the collective pain or suffering that has been afflicted on people at large.
Borrowing some lingo from your book, why is it important to ‘stop, unpack and deal with what has happened’ as a culture?
There’s never really been a moment where we’ve acknowledged and dealt with the ramifications of slavery or the genocide of indigenous people and many other dark things that have happened in U.S. history. It’s been swept under the rug. Young people today are going, ‘No, we’re not going to perpetuate what you guys did. We’re going to stop and talk about it.’ We need to do some grieving, some screaming, some listening. We’re the clean-up crew of some of the bullshit that’s been going on. And it’s really uncomfortable. No one wants to be the one to go, ‘Ok, let me clean up the fact that my ancestors did this thing or the fact that my parents never wanted to acknowledge things that happened when I was a kid.’ It’s not super fun work. However on the other side of it comes a massive release, joy, and gratitude that we’ve finally pulled the skeleton out of the closet and we can love bigger, have more fun, and we don’t have to have this dark cloud hanging over us as a country, as the world, or as a family. And that’s so important.
Speaking of young people, you talk about ‘getting lit’ in the emotional-spiritual sense. Not to say 55-year-old woman wouldn’t enjoy the book but did you have the younger generation in mind?
I wanted to write it in a voice that felt uplifting and fun. I think self-help or spirituality can have this serious holy vibe at times. It’s all ‘Namaste, let us take a deep breath’ and I wanted the voice to have more fire and punch and pizazz. And I don’t think that has to be youthful. I think it can speak to anyone. It might be an energy that comes from the hopefulness and freshness of youth. People think healing has to be heavy and spirituality has to be serious. I think neither of those things are true. Healing can be magical and artful and weird and wild. I think spirituality can be outside of the status quo of how we’ve experienced it via the traditional routes. To have the language feel playful and cheeky at times felt very important to me.
Definitely never seen so many F-bombs dropped in a self-help book before. How did ‘fucking,’ the word in all its connotations, take center stage in your glossary of expression?
That word holds a lot of energy and power. I love how that word can be used in ten different ways and we know the exact meaning based on the context. ‘I don’t give a fuck’ or ‘Fuck it’ or ‘Fuck you’ or ‘Let’s Fuck’ — it can have all these different meanings. I don’t think there’s that many words with such power.
You can say fucking like a goddess or fucking like a god or fucking like a rainbow, however you identify, but it’s about making love to your life. Letting your pain, your sorrow, your joy, letting it all penetrate you, and coming into union with it. Being all-in with life. Not trying to control everything. Fucking like a god/goddess/moonbeam is being all-in, just being down for whatever life is giving us. Right now it’s giving us Covid and political madness, alright, I’m all-in. I’m going to show up and be here for this moment. The word ‘fuck’ just has so much potency.
It’s super interesting that a word can hold so much power or be so threatening to others. To me putting the words ‘fuck’ and ‘goddess’ together is putting the sacred and the profane together. I love those notions together. They’re not that different, guys. That’s something we’ve been taught. We get to decide what is sacred. We get to write the story of our lives and stop listening to what we’ve been told that it is, which is part of the great dilemma we’re in. Who told us that the word ‘fuck’ is a bad word? Is that what we want to believe? It’s the same people who told us certain things about race. We get to say, ‘No fucking way, I’m done with those beliefs, I’m done with perpetuating them.’ But it takes a lot of energy to make the change. That’s why the word fuck is great, because it has a lot of energy within it. So you get to go, ‘Fuck that stuff, I’m changing those beliefs. I’m changing the way that I see this world because it’s still causing people harm. It’s causing the earth harm. It’s causing social injustice.’ It’s up to me to go ‘fuck that’ and change it.
When did you decide to write a book?
I’ve always been an artist and a creative. I’ve explored photography, film, documentary, commercials, playwriting, acting, music video, and fashion films. My work has been primarily as an artist and a lot around womens’ stories. The book is a medium I hadn’t explored. It felt like for the next kind of message that I wanted to put into the world, the best vehicle would be a book. For me it’s just being a creative and an artist and asking myself, what do I want to say next? How does creativity want to move through me? And listening as a creative and an artist to what medium that is.
If you could rewrite it right now, is there anything you would change? Would you add any chapter?
No because I feel like this was the download I got from the great creative source. David Lynch said something like, there’s a creative pool that we can all dive into at any point in time and it holds an infinite amount of ideas. I have always dived into that pool and I don’t question what I come out with. I trust the creative process. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this in her book, “Big Magic.” She’s says if a creative idea finds you and you don’t listen to it, it’s going to go find another home. It doesn’t mean that every idea is a masterpiece but it means that if you start not listening to the way the creative flow moves through you, it’s going to move on somewhere else. So I just take the orders and do my best and keep evolving through the art that I make.
A lot of your previous projects put you in the spotlight. Has shifting to help others fulfilled you in a way that “stardom” could not?
Absolutely. I felt that I could really get drugged by the Hollywood glitz and glamour. I think I did for a minute. I was getting invited to all the Hollywood parties and rubbing elbows with celebrities and then I got my face shoved in the mud by life. I got pushed off my high horse. I had two TV shows that were going to get bought and neither went to series and I was crushed. The pitch process is grueling. After that moment I was like, now what? And then I just heard a message inside that said, ‘You’re going to help other people.’ Other people need help to find the courage to speak up and remember their divinity and express themselves. Part of me was like, [puts on valley girl voice] ‘Ew, that’s so embarrassing.’ What’s everyone going to think of me that I’m coaching people and talking about spirituality? People are going to think I’ve gone crazy. My agents and fancy people around me did but I had enough friends that have known me a long time that said, ‘This has always been a huge part of you.’ The rest of the people from my glitzy period did fall away, and that’s ok. New people came into my life that supported me who are really all about helping the world and helping others. That’s been awesome. And I’m still aligned with artists, painters, musicians and people whose careers are servicing culture. I think we can all influence culture in very different ways and the most glamorous options are not necessarily the most effective.
How did you come to the conclusion that sexuality was at the core of healing rather than something intellectual or rationalization-based?
Part of the reason we’ve damaged the earth, and damaged groups or tribes that have listened to the earth’s wisdom, or women, like witches, who have been in union with the earth, is because there was this split between what is god and what is primal, aka not good. The vilification of earth-based wisdom and traditions has caused so much of the pain and suffering of the world. And to me sexuality is at the heart of being in the body and being close to the earth, the senses.
I hate to blame the puritanical church but when we look historically at why sexuality started becoming something hush-hush and potentially shamed, it has come from religion. There were many people with religions that included their bodies and their sexualities and included a communion with the earth. Once all that got ripped away there came a lot more suffering, degradation of women’s bodies, of children, of elders, of the earth, and of anyone who falls outside of those boxes.
Sexuality for the Westerner has been puritanized, white-washed, cleaned and then overexploited. It hasn’t found a balance and we know this because of the booming porn industry that generates billions of dollars. That’s a great barometer of our sexuality still being un-integrated and out of whack. Look at pedophilia and sex trafficking — which are such scary subjects and something people don’t want to admit that’s super existent — as humanity we are pretty out of balance around sexuality in general. I think that has a direct link to religion, patriarchy, genocide, witch trials, all of these things in our history that we are having to contend with right now.
In our own lives we can see and ask ourselves, well, what is the relationship with my own body? What is my relationship to the earth? What is my relationship to my own sexuality? Am I holding shame and guilt around my desire? Am I hiding my desire? Am I mad at my body for being a body? For being juicy and bloody and all of the things that it is? These ideas stem from puritanical beliefs embedded in our DNA. We have to say, ‘Ok, I’m done with that.’ I’m done with being ashamed of my body if I’m size 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, whatever. I’m done being ashamed of my desires, whatever they are. I’m done pretending I don’t heavily rely on the earth for everything I need. I should maybe honor the earth for giving me food and shelter.
That’s why sexuality and the integration and healing around it is so important. We need to examine these issues around sexuality, just like we need to look at oppression and racism, issues that we need to personally and collectively work on and take responsibility for.
Despite all the heavy stuff going on in the world, you mention that it’s a beautiful time to be a human on this planet. Why?
Because there’s a real opportunity to make art out of everything I just talked about. There’s opportunity to make change, to collaborate. There’s opportunity to really be visionaries of our own lives, take risks and chances. More than ever it’s not just needed but it’s accepted that we are changing. Maybe our moms and grandmothers didn’t have the privilege to stand and speak and create companies and organizations and write books, but we have that opportunity and we have the right.
We have social media. We have ways to raise money. That’s exciting. If you have an idea for how to impact the world positively, you can make a Gofundme and do it. That to me is epic. We have all the tools in front of us to make a great, magical, impactful life. If we don’t choose to show up and be all-in and share our gifts with the world then we’re holding back progress and not being responsible with this life we have. So it feels like a great opportunity to be a human. Anybody, a housewife in Minnesota can come up with a crazy amazing tik-tok account or invent a solution to a problem on the planet, and people are doing that all around the world. That is so inspiring to me.