Suzannah Weiss on Faith, Pleasure, and Why Consent Beats Rules

Emma Visser · 2026-10-16

Suzannah Weiss has never been interested in keeping things tidy. As a writer, sexologist, and certified sex educator, she's spent years pulling apart the assumptions we carry about desire, shame, and who gets to decide what's "pure." So when she sat down for a new Q&A with Pierre Des Esseintes, the conversation went exactly where you'd expect: straight into the messy, fascinating overlap between faith and pleasure. ### A Project Born From an Unexpected Awakening Weiss traces her Jesus Christ Pornstar project back to a spiritual awakening — one sparked, in part, by appearances of Jesus during psychedelic trips. That's a sentence you don't read every day. But the way she tells it, the experience reshaped how she sees faith entirely. What emerged is a modern Jesus who doesn't flinch at sex, psychedelics, or New Age spirituality — as long as they promote genuine well-being. Through works like *Uncovering Eve*, *The Second Cumming*, *Jesus Lessons*, and *Orgasmic Prayers*, she blends performance, body art, music, and adult content to push back against sexual shame. "My goal is to teach people how to be a Christian in the bedroom," she tells Des Esseintes. It's a line that sounds provocative until you sit with it. Then it starts to make a strange kind of sense. ### Redefining Purity Around How We Treat Each Other When asked how sexuality and spirituality can coexist, Weiss doesn't reach for loopholes. She reframes the whole question. Purity, in her view, isn't about restricting desire — it's about how we treat one another. > "Many social problems could be solved by placing less emphasis on arbitrary rules such as 'waiting until marriage' and prioritizing what really matters: consent, respect and safety." That reframing matters. It shifts the conversation from rule-following to responsibility — and it opens space for women's pleasure, bodily autonomy, and sexual experiences that actually nourish people, physically and spiritually. ### From Quaker Upbringing to Doctoral Research The Q&A digs into Weiss's Reconstructionist Jewish and Quaker roots, her *Porn Psychic* predictions, her orgasmic prayer practice, and her doctoral research on how religious sex workers reconcile their profession with faith. Her argument is pointed: sex workers, she believes, offer a valuable perspective on Jesus' teachings about inclusion, humility, and nonjudgment. In her words, "The world would be a better place if radical Christian whores ruled it!" Whether you agree or not, it's hard to look away. ### Who Is Shoshanna Blanca? Under the name Jesus Christ Pornstar — and as Shoshanna Blanca — Weiss is an adult performer, model, psychic medium, feminist writer, and certified sex educator. Her work includes: - *The Second Cumming* and *Uncovering Eve* — video and image series exploring the body, divinity, sexuality, and gender - *Hysterical Literature Bible Readings* — self-pleasure combined with prayer to evoke religious ecstasy - *Jesus Lessons* — teaching respectful bedroom conduct - *The Porn Psychic* — vlogs about her visions of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the apocalypse She's also a PhD student in clinical sexology, with an academic background spanning cognitive neuroscience, gender and sexuality studies, and sexual health. As Suzannah Weiss, she's a sex therapist and author of *Subjectified* and *Eve's Blessing*, which won the 2026 AASECT Book Award for General Audience. Her bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Playboy, among others. ### The Bigger Picture What makes Weiss's work worth paying attention to isn't the shock value — it's the underlying question. What if the rules we've been handed about sex and faith were never the point? What if consent, respect, and safety were always the real measure? That's the conversation she's inviting people into. And whether you're a person of faith, a skeptic, or just curious, it's one worth having.