Around this time last year, I was recovering from my action-packed trip to Las Vegas for the 2020 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo.

For those who have attended the yearly event, if you’ve seen a woman zipping around the convention wearing glasses and riding a mobility scooter, that was probably me.

There I had the pleasure of speaking with performer and sex educator Jessica Drake about her “Guide to Wicked Sex” film series.

Part of that interview is published in an earlier article,

Yet I’d left out some candid moments and words of wisdom for a second part. Being someone with chronic fatigue, however, I’ve had some delays, so I am delighted finally to share the rest of the interview now.

Often when people see celebrities and industry leaders, there’s a tendency to think they may “have it all” and compare themselves negatively. That’s why I so greatly appreciated how Drake was very open about her own sexual journey as well as about her health issues.

On finding her sexual voice and pleasure:

“This is a little on the cliché side, but the more comfortable you get with yourself, you in turn are more confident. It’s a cycle. When you have that confidence, you’re feeling more able to express your sexuality. I’m not saying that’s how it should be, I’m just saying I think that’s how humans tend to be.

Recognizing your pleasure-based needs and figuring out a way to satisfy them, I think that’s just so important. That’s sort of what happened to me.”

On learning how to get her needs met both on and off set:

“I’m on a set, there are so many men on the set: the lighting guys and the camera people and the still photographers. Men, men, men everywhere! I’m working with a man and the man comes and everything’s done.

It was representative of a lot of things. The reality is, [what would have happened] had I not been like, ‘well, what about me?’ Had I not had that awareness just to seek out my own pleasure?

Did it begin with me masturbating in bathrooms or going home and masturbating or getting stuck in traffic and pulling a vibrator out of my purse and buzzing one out in the car? Yeah, I did all those things.

But after I did, all those things and continually became more comfortable with my body, I really started asking for what I needed within the sex scene.

With my ex-husband, once we had sex, I didn’t come, he went into the shower. I was masturbating. He wasn’t in the shower. The shower was just running and he came back into the room and it was like, “uh ahhhh!’ It taught me to ask for what I want in the moment, even if you’re asking yourself for it.”

On dealing with burnout and self-care:

“For me, it’s really been a challenge to catch burnout before it happens because usually my schedule is jam-packed and halfway through the year I’m like, ‘I’m burnt out.’ But I have so many obligations I can’t stop.

So for me, self-care has looked like saying ‘I can’t take that job. I can’t work X number of days here because if I do, that’s going to be like 20, 25 days in a row, and that makes me not a great person at the end of all of that.

Self-care also looks like therapy. I’m a super fan of therapy. Sometimes self-care is indulging yourself in a bath and chocolate and other times it’s sitting down with your accountant to do your taxes because you’re going to feel way better when it’s done.

It’s really important to recognize things that we do for self-care that are necessary and then things that we do for self-care that just make us feel good, equally important.”

RELATED READ: Jessica Drake Plans ‘Senior Sex’ Sequel and Disability-themed Film for Sex Ed Series

On being proactive with her health:

“I have had for a really long time an immune system issue and I’m super anemic. We’re really trying to get to the bottom of that. I have an absorption issue, so I’m actually infused with iron every two weeks. But I’ve been really adamant about being an advocate for better medical care for myself.

I am fortunate to have health insurance. It’s one of the things that I negotiated with my contract with Wicked Pictures as a performer. It was just important to me. I knew I needed health insurance, so we made it a part of my deal. So self-care looks like that, too.”

On firing her doctor and getting better:

“I had a really dismissive general physician and throughout this, he would give me advice instead of treatment or referrals. I think he was just not listening to me.

For years, I let that continue to happen and that’s why we’ve gotten to this point because he was never proactive about it. I would tell him I’m experiencing heart palpitations or these symptoms and he’s like, ‘Oh, you’re stressed out with anxiety.’

I got really frustrated and I also kept getting really, really sick. I think three AVN’s ago I got sick here at the show and was running 105 degrees. I had to go to the hospital here. I got stuck [in Las Vegas] for a week. I had pneumonia, but it kept happening.

I kept getting massively sick like that. Finally, I went to an urgent care at my insurance place. I had a new doctor come in and she was like, what’s going on here? And she went through my chart and was just looking at all the things and the repeat visits and everything that kept reoccurring.

She sent me to get a lot of testing. She was the doctor that read my results before she passed them along. She started ordering treatment. I then fired the other doctor.

A lot of the time when you’re sick or when you’re going through stuff, we tend to listen to doctors because we think they know. But this person did not and they were super dismissive. So I got somebody else and it’s worked very well for me. I’m way closer to being healthy now. “

*Interview edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Image credits: Wicked Pictures [NSFW]