Length 1:36:50 Date: May 23, 2020

by Dr. Susan Block.

A world-class gymnastics champion becomes a porn star!

Gymnastics Champ turned Porn Star Verona van de Leur tells her story on DrSuzy.Tv

The amazing Verona van de Leur, the international gold-medal winning Dutch “Sportswoman of the Year” who turned herself into an adult entertainment sensation, is the fascinating subject of my 9^th Bedside Chat of the Coronapocalypse, inspired by FDR’s Fireside Chats, as we continue celebrating Masturbation Month on a balmy Memorial Day Weekend, and whip the Trumpus for inciting incel violence in the middle of a pandemic.

Verona van de Lear leaps into oversplit action!

What a stimulating, sensational, sapiosexual Bedside Chat!

Masturbation Memorial

Masturbation Month and Memorial Day Weekend always feel to me like odd bedfellows, but calendarically, they are pre-destined to coincide.

How to celebrate both? Manhandle those hot dogs, boys!  Mash those potatoes, ladies

Masked Up for Memorial Day in Masturbation Month while Quarantining with Sunshine. Photo: Harry Sapien

For most Americans, Memorial Day is all about the barbeque. Of course, Memorial Day is also a requiem for the dead—the people who have been barbequed in America’s Perma-Wars.

The American dead, that is.  The other dead can get their own holiday, right?  Memorial Day is for America’s dead soldiers. We are the Masturbation Nation serving the Multi-Nation Corporations.

Thus, on this solemn sunny weekend, we salute our fallen troops, but we do not salute the Perma-Wars they died fighting in other nations, whose citizens also masturbate, just like we do.  That’s part of what it means to be human, and to accept it in ourselves and others is part of what it means to be humane.

Whether your particular nation condemns masturbation as an evil sin or just calls it a pathetic “sex addiction,” hardly matters. We all do it, at least sometimes—or even several times a day!

Merry Masturbation Month 2020! Photo: Harry Sapien

Wars or no wars (and wouldn’t it be great if there were no wars?), we are One World in Wanking.

Incel Terrorism

This section has been excerpted for publication in
COUNTERPUNCH, “America’s Best Political Newsletter” (Outback)

Meanwhile, our current “war” against Coronavirus is moving right along, as wars do, killing people.

If these people aren’t folks you know or care about, they’re just statistics; but each one is special to at least someone and usually to many more. Each COVID-19 death in this “richest” of all countries in the world is an American tragedy.

Stretching to get ready for our special gymnastic guest! Photo: Unscene Abe

It’s notable that all these American dead people were not helped in the least by America’s vaunted military that we honor on Memorial Day.

While we lavish billions on high tech weapons to try to defeat low-tech “enemies,” we still can’t afford to outfit our medical workers with proper masks and other equipment.

Nevertheless, the cause of “freedom,” warped and twisted as it is in tRump’s America, not to mention capitalism without apologies, is sweeping across the quasi-locked-down land.

Photo 3: Unscene Abe. Photos 1,2,4,5: Harry Sapien

Quarantines are lifting, even as death counts are rising to nearly 100,000 dead Americans, thanks greatly to the Orange Hydroxychloroquine and Bleach-Chugging Carnival Barker’s major mishandling of everything.

America is getting back to “normal,” but what does that mean? Mass shootings, for one thing. No school shootings—though that’s mainly because there’s no school. But the other day, a self-proclaimed incel with an AR-15 went and shot up some folks he didn’t know (one in critical condition) in a Glendale, Arizona entertainment center.

If this is getting back to normal, I’ll take abnormal please.

“When society belittles human sexual needs and denigrates sex workers… the incel mass murder syndrome will thrive. Reverse that, and it will wither on its own insidious vine.”

Incels are “involuntary celibates.”  The term was actually coined by a woman(!) named Alana in the late 1990s who was trying to help fellow virgins and lonely singles find love, but it was coopted to foster hate, blame and misogyny by bitter refugees from the “men’s rights” and pick-up artist cultures.

Most of these “incels” blame women who they say unfairly reject them, while some, like the Arizona shooter—20-year-old Armando Hernandez, Jr.—also blame couples whose affection for each other ignites incendiary feelings of jealousy.

Actually, I think a lot of mass shooters—and spitters—are secret incels. They usually don’t identify as incels or even look at the online propaganda, but they are plagued by lonely, depressed, unsatisfying love lives, and they aggressively pin the blame for their personal grievances on others. Some find inspiration in the Blamer-in-Chief.

Sunshine puts on her starry socks for Memorial Day. Photo: Harry Sapien

Though technically speaking, they are “involuntary celibates” with lousy-to-nonexistent sex lives, they don’t particularly want anyone to know. They’d be too embarrassed.

But some recent suspects have been proudly declaring themselves to be incels, like it’s a movement or a cult, which it pretty much is, complete with a twisted belief system akin to religious extremist groups. The incel “movement” even has a mass murder/suicide messiah in Elliot Rodger, son of Hunger Games director Peter Rodger, who shot, stabbed and killed six people and wounded 14 others in Santa Barbara, leaving behind a series of videos and writings constituting an incel “manifesto.” Then there’s Rodger’s even more lethal apostle, Alek Minassian, who murdered 10 people and injured 16 others by running them over with a van, committing the worst mass homicide in Toronto’s history, after posting on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!”

This is why Canada is designating incel violence as a terrorist act, or an “Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE) movement,” stirred into action by the horrific February, 2020 killing of a female sex worker—24-year-old Ashley Noelle Arzaga—with a machete in an erotic massage parlor, as well as the injuring of two others, by a 17-year-old self-declared incel.

Masked Warriors for Peace through Pleasure of Bonoboville. Photo: Harry Sapien

Without a doubt, these incel murderers are terrorists, and the designation helps increase public awareness of the growing incel problem in our midst.

However, I’m afraid that calling them “terrorists” or “IMVE” will only turn on actual incels, at least the more violent ones. It gives them a mission, makes them feel important, even powerful. It will not reduce incel crime.

The only thing that will reduce incel crime is to make systemic changes in our incel-riddled society, to reverse the course of the American Way of War for Profit that brings us barbequed dead for Memorial Day and even more dead in the Coronapocalypse, and to follow the Bonobo Way of peace through pleasure, sharing resources, female empowerment, male well-being and general sex-positive values.

That means treating people’s need for sex and love as legitimate as their need for food and shelter. Even though love and sex are not as critical as food and shelter on an everyday basis, they are essential to human well-being.

That doesn’t mean anyone should be forced to have sex with anyone else. Thus reactionary patriarchal calls for “enforced monogamy” from the likes of Jordan Peterson should be more forcefully denounced and shunned, not just treated like a conservative curiosity.

That means honoring consensual sex and sex work. Bonobos and many other nonhuman animals engage in “sex work” when they trade “sex for meat” or bananas, or whatever is of value, showing us that the “sex trade” is natural and can be good for the community.

That doesn’t mean forcing sex workers to have sex with incels. Sex workers deserve as much freedom of sexual choice and safety as anyone else. It just means respecting sex workers as people. The fact that this latest incel killer, a teenager, wasn’t just calling all women “whores,” as most incels do, but actually murdered a sex worker, underlines this urgent societal imperative.

That does mean treating “johns,” aka sex work customers, with dignity. Paying for consensual sex shouldn’t be any more stigmatized than paying for lunch or a trip to Disneyland (not during the Coronapocalypse, obviously). Incels gripe that paying for sex marks them as “inferior men” because our society treats it as inferior.

Masturbation should also be normalized as a healthy way to release sexual tension. Sexual solitaire is only game most incels are playing, albeit with great socially-sanctioned guilt, shame and self-loathing. If only they could just relax and enjoy it! Maybe we could save a few lives.

Government organizations like the New York Department of Health (NYDOH) recently listed self-pleasure as an appropriate form of safe sex for single people who are physically distancing and self-isolating in the Coronapocalypse. That’s a great step in the right direction. But as “America goes back to normal,” let’s not go back to our normal way of denigrating self-love.  Masturbation has been a much-avoided topic in sex education and, as we wind up the merry Masturbation Month of May, let us continue to treat jacking and jilling off as forms of erotic expression as legitimate as partner sex—sometimes even superior.

This also means valuing LGBTQ sex as much as the straight kind. Many incels express homosexual, bisexual and transgender feelings, even as they despise those desires in themselves and others. One key to the Bonobo Way of peace through pleasure is that pretty much all bonobos are bi or pansexual. That’s not to say that all humans need to be bi or pan, but if we could fully accept sexual fluidity in others, we’d go a long way toward making peace in our communities and giving the incel insurgency one less weapon for their arsenal of hate.

It also means respecting people who seek sex therapy and other forms of treatment for the kind of sexual anxiety, rage and depression that leads them to incel culture. And it means providing government subsidies to make that treatment free or at least, more affordable.

It means stop elevating brute force as the “finest” expression of masculinity—from perpetrating deadly useless Perma-Wars to executing a man with a police officer’s knee on his neck. With masculine role models like these, why do we wonder how incels get vicious?

Last but certainly not least, following the Bonobo Way means sharing the financial wealth (bonobos love to share), and the sexual wealth will follow.

Masked or Unmasked, we’ve been preaching and practicing the Bonobo Way for almost three decades. Photo: Selfie

Seriously, these awful incels are onto something when they gripe about “unfairness.” Things really are unfair. Of course, incel “solutions” (enslaving or killing women) really suck. But a little socialism would help to free people from making sexual choices based solely on economic need.

When society belittles human sexual needs and denigrates sex workers who try to earn an honest living providing for those needs—on top of urging people to accumulate wealth at the expense of others and blame others for their grievances—incel terrorism will thrive.

Reverse all of that, and it will wither on its own insidious vine.

That’s just my opinion, that of a not-so-humble sexologist, and that’s what Capt’n Max and I have been preaching and practicing for the past 28 years.

One way we do it is by interviewing, humanizing and honoring real sex workers, many of whom are quite remarkable human beings.

This section has been excerpted for publication in
COUNTERPUNCH, “America’s Best Political Newsletter” (Outback)

From Gymnastic Champ to Porn Star: Verona van de Leur

One of out most remarkable guests is the subject of this Bedside Chat: the amazing Verona van de Leur, the world renowned championship gymnast who became a porn star.

Verona van de Lear on DrSuzy.Tv, Photo: Harry Sapien

You may have heard about her on CNN or other news outlets that have picked up her story.

But nowhere else will you find such an in-depth and illuminating conversation with this phenomenal woman as you’ll find here on DrSuzy.Tv (listen above or watch below).

Welcome Verona!

Verona is a kind of real-life Superwoman. Very few people have her extremely special talents.

How many of us can do an aerial cartwheel, an oversplit or a back handspring?

And that’s just the warm up…

Verona with some of her championship trophies and medals.

Yet her story is one we can all relate to.

Most of us will never compete in an international athletic championship, let alone win a gold medal. But we all go through achievement and disappointment, stress and betrayal, love and loss, and those of us who are lucky and strong enough, experience renewal, perhaps the most sublime form of success there is.

One of the world’s top gymnasts in the world, named Dutch Sportswoman of the Year in her native country of the Netherlands, and winner of many championships, including gold, silver and bronze medals, Verona was at the top of the international women’s gymnastics game in the early 2000s.

Then things happened, her world turned upside down and inside out, and she became an adult entertainer, erotic artist or you could say, a porn star—and a great one!

She is also the author of a new book Simply Verona: Breaking All the Rules, that tells the riveting story of her life so far, some of which she shares in our Bedside Chat.

Verona starts by describing her early years, training since she was five years old, giving us a peak into the exciting yet stressful, privileged yet extremely proscribed, highly esteemed yet high-pressured life of a young gymnastic prodigy.

Verona recounts her championship days.

How exhilarating to win all those medals and championships, and to be known throughout her country and others as the greatest Dutch sportswoman!

Fall of Verona

But no matter how well this very “good girl” did, there was always extreme pressure—from her coaches, her country and her own parents—to do better, to push herself harder, to work out more, to virtually starve her already very slim body, to concentrate her already laser-focused mind, to excel and win the next competition against other talented young gymnasts eager to take her place at the top.

Then she fell.

Talking about being locked out by your own parents. Photo: Harry Sapien

She describes it in heartbreaking, ankle-wrenching detail, how she leapt up into a difficult spin and then down she tumbled in the middle of a competition, twisting her ankle. It hurt like hell, but she continued to perform through the pain in that moment and for the next several weeks, at the urging of the “adults” around her, making it worse.

Thanks to the injury, she didn’t make it to the Olympics, her lifelong dream. Despondent, yet resolved to take control of her own life and move on, she decided to officially quit professional competitive gymnastics.  She was 22.

Her parents were appalled.

As we chat, we try to make sense of how Verona’s otherwise “normal” mom and dad could reject their beautiful, long-suffering daughter in favor of trying to force her to get back in the game, win more medals, as well as the prize money and lucrative sponsorships that go along with them.

Mars FX and Unscene Abe at the Board. Photo: Harry Sapien

All we can come up with is that parenting in our society is hard work. Raising a sports wunderkind might be especially hard for parents like Verona’s who hadn’t had any experience in sports themselves. Deprived of much “family time” that might have drawn them closer together so that little Verona could practice-practice-practice, they virtually sacrificed their daughter to the “gods” of athletic success, prestige and money-money-money.

Perhaps that’s one reason why Verona’s mother and father couldn’t bear to see their prodigy/commodity leave competitive gymnastics, even if it was for her own good.

After she quit, her parents locked her out of the house and took huge sums of money out of her bank account which they claimed were for her past expenses. She eventually won that money back when a judge agreed that it was, in fact, hers.

But what an ordeal. The betrayal cut deep, and she still doesn’t speak to her parents.

Living out of her car.

Locked out by her own mom and dad, practically starving, with no income nor prospects, she suddenly found herself homeless and living out of a car with her boyfriend.

Holland is famous for taking care of its citizens and, thanks to its substantial social safety net, no one has to go hungry or without shelter there. But young Verona was too proud to present herself to Dutch social services, reluctant to face people’s judgment when they realized that this down-and-out homeless person was once the Dutch “Sportswoman of the Year.”

Sunshine asks a question.

Then she got busted for blackmail. It sounds awful, but when she tells the story (listen above or watch below), it sounds like she was pretty much enticed into committing the crime by the woman she was blackmailing, and I challenge anyone to prove they wouldn’t do something similar in her shoes.

“Making porn on her own terms in an artistic, entrepreneurial spirit, with the partner she loved … was financially and emotionally empowering, not to mention physically fun for a gal who loves to stretch and do splits.”

Her vivid, breathtaking description of being raided—in her car at 5 A.M.—by a SWAT-team-like squad of police is horrific.

Stuff like that happens in America all the time (it happened in Bonoboville!), but we thought the Netherlands would have more enlightened policing.

Talking about the Realities of Rejection, Incarceration and Depression.

Apparently not, though U.S. cops might have easily shot her, her boyfriend or one of the neighbors during the arrest.

She served 73 days in jail for her “crime” (that wasn’t even actually committed, just agreed to).  A travesty of justice, to be sure, but it could have been worse.

Actually, I’m more indignant about it than Verona herself who humbly says she deserved her punishment.

Around this time, she was so depressed, she almost killed herself by throwing herself in front of a train as she waited at the station.

Fortunately for the world, she didn’t do it.

I ask her what advice she might give, based on her brush with suicidal ideation, to the many people who are depressed and suicidal, especially now in the Coronapocalypse.

Talk to people, she replies. Don’t keep to yourself.  Don’t hold your feelings in.

What advice do you have for people struggling with depression in the Coronapocalypse?

Excellent advice. Though it’s perhaps easier said than done. And of course, it’s something that took Verona herself a while to learn how to do. The Westgate incel shot three people after two friends weren’t available when he called. Patience is more than a virtue; it’s a life-saver.

Verona’s Porno Revolution

Some say porn ruins your life, but Verona van de Leur says it saved hers.

Verona Unleashed

At least, it gave her a lift up and out of her doldrums and downward spiral.

Making porn on her own terms in an artistic, entrepreneurial spirit, with the partner she loved (and has been with for 13 years now), was financially and emotionally empowering, not to mention physically fun for a gal who loves to stretch and do splits.

Naked Gymnastics

Yes indeed, a lot of porn shows off erotic athletics and sexual gymnastics (or it tries to), but Verona van de Leur is the real deal!

Not many humans can perform sexual gymnastics like Verona can. Of course, bonobos are natural gymnasts as well as great lovers. They swing through the trees and with each other.

Verona swings like a bonobo on the monkey bars. Photo: Harry Sapien

Watching Verona swing on the parallel bars from one bar to another reminds me of bonobos and other apes and monkeys swinging from one branch to another… and isn’t that why they call them monkey bars?

But then there are her amazing splits that no nonhuman primate can do.

She specializes in “oversplits” (a split in which the angle formed by the legs measures greater than 180 degrees). Leaping into an airborne oversplit makes her appear to be more of an angel than even the most agile of apes.

Maybe like a gazelle.

Leaping Verona over Leaping Gazelle

I’ve always loved gymnastics partly because, even though it’s competitive, it’s not a game where players fight each other. It looks more like ballet than a sport; like a beautiful, gravity-defying dance.

Gymnastics is inherently sexy, showing off the body in skimpy outfits doing outlandish things. I’ve always had an eye for gymnasts; my college boyfriend was on the Yale gymnastics team specializing in… monkey bars!

Ancient Greek (or Cretan?) Naked Female Gymnast Hand-stand on an early “apparatus”: a live bull!

The Greeks did gymnastics in the nude, as they wrestled in the original Olympics.

In fact, the word “gymnasium” comes from the Greek word “γυμνός,” meaning naked

Verona’s perfect naked handstand split.

So maybe it’s not such a stretch to go from Championship Gymnastics to Sexual Gymnastics.

But for Verona, it meant going from “Good Girl” to “Bad,” as the title of her porno promo, “Going Bad,” indicates.

Her favorite position is doggystyle, and one of her favorite sex acts is giving a blowjob.

She acknowledges that she’s an exhibitionist, even before I ask her.

Most gymnasts are exhibitionists, she opines.

Sunshine and I enjoy our guest’s phenomenal “flexibitionism.” Photo: Harry Sapien

One of our favorite photographers, Jux Lii, watching the show on our live feed, calls Verona a “flexibitionist.”

When I wish her a Merry Masturbation Month, she says she masturbates about five times a week, usually with her vibrator, in addition to her active sex life.

Merry Masturbation Month Verona!

More often, she is an object of masturbatory desire for others. What do her fans request most? “For me to put my hair in a ponytail and wear a leotard.” Obviously, she attracts gymnastic fetishists!

Though most worship her unique, highly trained skills, there are always the skeptical who say, “You weren’t really in gymnastics, were you?”

Photos: Harry Sapien

The world is so saturated with fake news, you can’t blame them for wondering, but a quick Google search will reveal Verona’s gymnastic truth.

Her fans will be happy to hear that even though she said she would stop making porn, she’s back at it.

After all, the Coronapocalypse shut down the conventions where she’d been invited to speak and the competitions she was going to judge, so what else is there to do but make more porn?

Sexy Split. Photo: Harry Sapien

It’s a talent you can literally fall back on.

Verona’s name is taken from the Italian city of Verona, where Romeo and Juliet met and fell in love in Shakespeare’s great romantic tragedy. Giving her that name is one great gift her parents gave her that they didn’t try to take back, and yes, Verona van de Leur is her real name.

It’s so refreshing to meet a porn star who uses her real, given name.  Of course, I respect adult performers’ right to privacy, and I understand why, in our sex worker-denigrating society, they want to try to keep their porn life separate from their family life. But it’s nice to see someone as open about who she is as me… or Sunshine McWane (yes, that’s her real name, though many of her fans don’t believe that).

Verona is the real deal. She even uses her real name! Photo: Harry Sapien

Almost everybody believes that “Susan Block” is my real name because, well, who would pick such a dorky name as that?

Going Dutch

Though she’s camming to us from Belgium, Verona, of course, a native of Holland, one of our favorite places, and home of our old friends Willem de Ridder (who published the reader-written magazines, Love, Hate, Finger and God, with Pr. Max back in the day) and Xaviera Hollander, the most famous sex worker of the Sexual Revolution who penned The Happy Hooker.

Chatting about Willem, Xaviera, Dutch “Sex Buddies” and “Intelligent Lockdown.” Photo: Harry Sapien

We love Holland, but we’re not sure what to make of their “Intelligent Lockdown” concept wherein they have counted over 5800 Coronavirus deaths so far in a population of 17 million. Compare that with the country of Taiwan which has a population of 24 million and only seven Coronavirus deaths.

I do like that the Dutch government has suggested that people get “sex buddies” to help make quarantine more pleasant. But what should incels do? Perhaps the Dutch safety net covers sex workers for incels; if they don’t, they should.

Well, in honor of Holland, we have Heinekens all around, a good Dutch beer that usually gets cheers of approval from Dutch people.

Unfortunately, Verona isn’t too excited about it, since she doesn’t drink or smoke, a healthy habit that this Good Girl developed as a champion gymnast and continues even after “Going Bad.”

But she does us one better by saying “Watch the Dr. Susan Block Show!” in Dutch. No, I can’t translate. You have to listen above or watch below for that.

Then before we can say, “Round-Off Back-Handspring Blow-Job,” it’s time to go.

What a delightful time with a fascinating woman. We love porn stars and sex workers of all kinds on DrSuzy.Tv, and it’s great to see more and more making their mark in the world, being honored as people as well as porn stars, from porn star/comedian Sally Mullins to porn star/political heroine Stormy Daniels. Even in this rarified group, Verona van de Leur leaps above the crowd, at least when it comes to sexual gymnastics, over-splitting over all. She certainly deserves a medal—or trophy—or her athletic, imaginative porn.

An extraordinary individual, but a great team player, Verona applauds our Bonoboville team after her outstanding interview.

Hmmm…. I think I see a 2020 SUZY award in my crystal ball… You’re next, AVN…XBIZ…Golden Globes?

The Plague, the Pool & the Monkey Bars of Pleasure

With just a few minutes to wind up the show, I recommend that everyone follow The Bonobo Way, get into our Speakeasy Journals of Splosh ‘n’ Art and Spank ‘n’ Art, and read an old book with newly endowed meaning, The Plague, by Albert Camus.

Photos 1, 5: Selfies.  Photos 2-3: Sunshine McWane.  Photo 4: Harry Sapien

When I first read it in college French class, The Plague meant nothing to me, perhaps because my French was never very good, though I was intrigued by Camus’ involvement with the French Resistance.

Now I’m reading it in English, and Camus’ classic tale of a 1940s French African town suffering as the whole world suffers now from a mysterious infectious disease that kills more and more people as it drives everyone else stark raving mad…

Masked Memorial Day Banquet. Photo: Selfie

Holding the madness at bay, even just for today, Bonoboville chows down on Ana’s fabulous food.

Artistic Sunshine, feeling sad that we aren’t having outside guests over in the Coronapocalypse, displays cut-outs of our guest and others on the dining table.

She also has a finger puppet of Vincent Van Gogh, in honor of our Dutch guest, though I wouldn’t know its Van Gogh because he still has both his ears.

Foreplay Split. Photo: Unscene Abe

We practice physical distancing somewhat, though we could be better about it… maybe if we had an 50 foot dining table or hazmat suits.

At least, we’re better at physical distancing than those frolicking drunken spreaders swarming like a school of guppies in a Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri pool.  Honestly, I’m all for orgiastic fun and freedom, but I wouldn’t go near that people-packed, most certainly germ-infested, water wonderland even without a pandemic going on. Well, maybe with a few more Heinekens, I wouldI

Wake Me Up when you’re ready for sex, Honey… Photo: Unscene Abe

sincerely hope none of them catch that damn virus, but if they do, they should arrange a quick, maskless trip to the White House.

Speaking of orgiastic fun… disinfected and unmasked, that’s just what Capt’n Max and I have.

Before we leave the studio, I do some splits—no, not oversplits, just the (relatively) easy kind—as foreplay.

Not that the Captain and I engage in any sexual gymnastics.

For us, it’s athletic enough just to have basic sex, cowgirl-style.

But visions of sexual gymnasts leap like angels flying through our fantasies as we fall between the monkey bars of pleasure.

Tongue Gymnastics. Photo: Selfie

May 23, 2020 Susan Block, Ph.D., a.k.a. “Dr. Suzy,” is a world renowned LA sex therapist, author of The Bonobo Way: The Evolution of Peace through Pleasure and horny housewife, occasionally seen on HBO and other channels. For speaking engagements, call 213-291-9497.