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s an empowerment coach, I’ve been fascinated for most of my adult life by one question: what does it actually mean to be powerful? Not the perceived power you gain from external things, but the power that lives within you. Rooted in yourself. Lit up from the inside. Alive in the full, messy, glorious range of who you actually are.
I’m Venus Valencia, adult actress, and I’m also Krystal Aranyani, bestselling spiritual author, empowerment coach, and tantra teacher trained across East Asia. I’ve guided people in over seventy countries back to their inner power and most authentic, pleasured selves. I don’t go by two different names because I’m ashamed of one, or because I believe they should be separate. I go by two names because the world is still working out how to hold one woman being both.
By my early thirties I’d lived what most people would consider a full life. I’d lived out of a suitcase for over a decade, traveling the world, immersing myself in different cultures, teaching at festivals and hosting retreats, and building a successful career as a published author. I was following a purposeful path that mattered deeply to me.
Then in 2023, at the height of my dream career, I hit a major Tower card moment.
I lost a pregnancy. A month later, the father also passed away. An entire life I’d envisioned and spent so much energy creating, gone.
Grief has a way of stripping you down and forcing you to look more clearly, more truthfully, at your life. In that stillness I found myself asking a question I hadn’t asked in a long time: if I were on my deathbed, what would I regret? I went through everything, every unlived version of myself, every desire I had apologized for, or kept quietly hidden away because it didn’t fit the mold my community or clients had made of me.
The only desire I found I had ignored was to explore adult films. To create art from the erotic energy that ran through my being and dive into its depths further. I’d briefly explored having an OnlyFans, which came with a lot of backlash from the spiritual community. When I listened honestly to the desire burning within me, that was it.
That led me to ask a second question: if I didn’t care, even slightly, what anyone thought, what would I do tomorrow?
I would fly to LA and do porn.
So that’s what I chose. Even if it meant ruining my reputation. Even if it cost me everything I’d spent fifteen years building. It was worth it. To me it was the most alive and empowering thing I could do at that moment in my life. Some choices aren’t logical. They’re just true. And as long as our choices aren’t hurting anyone else, I don’t believe we owe anyone an explanation for them.
What’s empowering for one doesn’t need to be empowering for another. I’ve found that many outside of the industry find it hard to understand how this work could be empowering for a woman, because they feel it wouldn’t be for them. But that’s the beauty of being human. We’re all living our own unique realities. And just because a path is different, doesn’t make it wrong. And from what I’ve witnessed, the main struggles women in this industry face don’t actually come from the work itself. They come from the judgment and isolation society places on them. That is not an industry problem. That is a society problem.
I have the word “More” tattooed on the side of my ribcage because I’ve long believed it’s one of the most powerful words a woman can claim. We’re taught to shrink ourselves to a size that doesn’t make others uncomfortable. To remain politely quiet rather than use our wild voices and speak our truth. The women I’ve met in this industry refuse to live that way. In their most exposed, most vulnerable state, they still ask for (and scream for) more. More pleasure. More energy. More passion. More truth. More life! To me, that is power in its rawest expression.
Here’s what most of us were taught: desire is something that happens to you, not something that lives within you. Wanting, really wanting, boldly and without apology, makes you dangerous. Reckless. Someone to be managed. The suppression of sexual desire was never an accident. It was and still is one of the most effective tools ever invented for controlling people. Make someone ashamed of what they want and you own them. We’ve lived inside that suppression for so long that many of us have confused our conditioning for our nature. Our cage for our character.
The first time I was spread eagle, legs wide open, my yoni (Sanskrit for “sacred space” and “source of life,” the word I choose over “vagina” which translates to “sheath for a sword”) fully visible to a room full of people, cameras rolling, lights blazing, I didn’t feel shame. I didn’t feel fear. The room fell quiet for a moment. Every eye moved to that sacred space and I felt a raw feminine power awakening within me that I’d never experienced before. This is coming from a woman who has attended and hosted hundreds of feminine empowerment workshops. That moment didn’t take something from me or shrink me. It reminded me of the true power of the erotic Goddess who lives within us all.
That’s not to say that exact experience would feel empowering for everyone, but for me it was powerful because it meant finally choosing the one wild desire I had spent my life pushing down.
I’ve spent over a decade studying traditional tantra lineages, and one of the things it has taught me most profoundly is that all of this human experience is sacred. All of it. Including and especially the parts that society has spent centuries trying to tame. That includes the animalistic. The primal. The raw, unfiltered expression of sexuality that exists in us before societal conditioning. Tantra doesn’t ask us to rise above that. It asks us to stop being ashamed of it. The full spectrum belongs to us. And we are here to experience it.
I believe that pornography is the most sacred form of art we can share in this existence. Because sexual energy is existence itself. It’s the very force that creates worlds. A woman’s yoni is the most sacred portal on earth. Every human being alive arrived through one. And yet we have spent centuries shaming it, hiding it, making women feel that the most sacred part of their body is somehow their dirtiest secret. Desire is what points us towards our most aligned path, suppression and shame tend to make the path of hearing our true desires difficult.
We have taken the most alive, most creative energy available to a human and made it shameful to express, shameful to share, shameful to witness openly. In doing so, we haven’t protected anything. We have simply cut people off from one of the most powerful sources of truth and aliveness they have access to.
What I’ve learned most about power is this: it cannot be given to you and it cannot be taken away from you. It is already within you. You ignite it the moment you choose to follow what makes you feel most alive and listen to your sacred, authentic (perhaps even wild) desire.
