Sex Work and Sob Stories
I love Serpent’s post so much I have write my own. I think it’s very important to point out the types of harms sex workers face that don’t get the press, don’t get the attention of anti-traffickers and all that jazz. I loved what Serpent said:
…I have had experiences that have been emotionally and psychologically abusive. I found a way to eliminate those from my life and never will I work for any type of agent, manager, or establishment in this industry again. This is what made the difference from me being a scared, depressed sex worker to a emotionally stable and fully independent worker who loves what she does.
Serpent points out that most of her bad experiences were from working for other people. A million fucking times yes to this. This is the face of criminalization, folks. When you make us criminals, don’t let us network and learn and work for ourselves, we get put in shit situations.
This is also the face of stigma. The time I got ripped off out of state, I was doing something legal. No cop would even take my report. I quit the industry for two years because it fucked me up so badly emotionally. There was also the strip club I worked for that wouldn’t let me leave when I had a family emergency, so I had to walk out and quit.
I worked for an agency for a while that wasn’t too bad, as far as agencies go. I had to split my money with them, which I thought kind of sucked, especially since I couldn’t set my own prices. They tried to get me to work more days or days I didn’t want to work, but I was able to hold my ground. I left eventually to strike out on my own as a dominatrix.
And I love being independent, especially now that my life has been really chaotic. I only see who I want, when I want, and all my money is mine.
So yes, I could tell you some sob stories, all of them involving some dude who thinks he’s a fucking pimp treating me like he thinks you treat a whore. And no amount of beefing up the laws is going to stop dickwads like that from abusing women. But if you let the women work together or alone, dudes like that don’t get the same power.
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Tags: pimps, sex work
Uh, hi, world.
In case you didn’t notice, I haven’t been blogging. (Although that hasn’t stopped the trolls, it seems.) I’ve had a string of really fucking shit things happen in my life that have stopped me from activism, blogging, reading other blogs, and even working. I’ve always approached my work as almost therapy. I like it. It keeps me going. But right now, I don’t have the emotional energy for dealing with the few shit clients that filter through my rigid screening.
But I’m taking a break from my blog to focus on not being a total mess. I love you, all my fellow whores, so keep being fabulous and rocking it the fuck out.
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Tags: hiatus, sex work
I’m not your Proof.
Okay, feminists, let’s get real about something. I’m getting pretty fucking sick of the use of people with eating disorders to make some sort of point about the patriarchy. We are people who have had experiences and continue to have voices with which to discuss our experiences. Kind of like sex workers. Novel fucking concept, I know.
Whenever feminists talk about the media, someone inevitably brings up eating disorders as a way to make a point about the harmful effects of male-domination on women. First, the media does not cause eating disorders in the way you’re thinking. Second, we’re not victims of the patriarchy.
I don’t like being talked about like I’m somehow the thing that proves everything the feminists are saying. Don’t use my experiences to make your point about your issue. I can talk about myself, thanks, (and I invite other people with eating disorders to talk about yourselves, too).
It’s exactly like when feminists talk about sex workers. If we happen to be present, anything we have to say that refutes the Feminist Point of the Moment is dismissed as false consciousness or just our personal ideas. It’s really belittling and dismissive of our experiences.
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Tags: eating disorders, feminism, feminists, sex work
Have you heard about this? The claim is that it will cut down on terrorism. Or something. I mean, invoke terrorism, and our rights are always out the window. I happen to use a prepaid cell phone for work purposes. You know why? So clients can’t look my number up and find out my legal name. And then stalk or kill me. So, thoughts? Bad idea? Good idea? Am I just a paranoid whore?
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Tags: law, prepaid, sex work
I spent part of my 21st birthday in the bathroom crying. We were all out at a bar. I don’t remember why, but I remember that my ex-boyfriend made me cry. I had some sort of terribly deluded idea that I was going to be friends with him, that you can drift from fucking to dating to friends without issue. I was idealistic, thinking that because I was open and embracing my sexuality and exploring both bisexuality and non-monogamy, that I would live in a feminist utopia.
No. He was quite mean to me for a long time, despite my la-la land fantasies about us being Okay. That is, until I had a breakdown one night over my roommate’s dog destroying the trash and coming home from the bar to find chicken bones and lettuce flung about my apartment. I started sobbing and realized, hey, this guy is a self-important fucking asshole. The end.
This memory came back to me because I was thinking about how to explain to someone that I’m thinking of coming out to about why I became a whore. The usual narrative that I’ve constructed and become comfortable with is that I didn’t know what else to do with my life. Actually, I was thinking about coming out to this person, but also thinking about explaining to a group of people close to me the experience of finding out you’re not dead after all.
Let me back up. I had thought, for a long time while I was sick, that I would be dead by the time I was 21. I kind of planned on it, actually. In the sense that I was doing everything to hasten my demise. That’s kind of what an eating disorder is.
So, again, I find myself not dead (surprise!) and without a concrete plan. And definitely not the ability to hold down a straight job and work straight hours. So, yeah, I became a whore. Kind of just like that. But not really.
Then, on my 21st, I am in a shitty chain bar crying in the bathroom, still alive to my surprise and confusion, and now a whore. I’d just started working. I really had no idea what the hell I was getting into and I did fuck up really badly that summer. (Because even though I am happy, I am not a Happy Hooker.)
It was not the first time he made me cry. (And, duh, not the last.) I was shaking mad when I told him I was going into sex work. He actually told me that I could not prostitute myself (his words) and still be a feminist. To which I got out of his car, slammed the door, and went into my apartment in a huff. I wrote an angry poem about how fucking stupid it was that a guy in a male body was telling me, a woman in a female body, what I should think of my social world. Thanks, asshole.
And I kind of find myself replaying this situation as I think about coming out to different people. I no longer feel the need to justify my actions to anyone. But this is as much about being older and wiser as it is about cutting assholes out of my life. So, wherever you are, darling ex-boyfriend, it’s almost my birthday (again) and I haven’t fucking cried on my birthday since then. I’m a whore and this is what a feminist looks like.
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Tags: coming out, feminism, mental illness, sex work, stigma
You know, I never thought that I would, but I got burnt out. I’m taking a hiatus from activism for a couple of months to hopefully get my steam up. I think I always expected to maybe someday get burn out, but I wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like.
It feels pretty fucking awful. I simultaneously just do not give a flying fuck about the world’s problems and really, really guilty for bailing on everyone. Especially now with all the End Demand Illinois stuff. But I’ve been letting people down left and right and I just don’t care anymore. Which is why I’m not helpful. So it’s more a hiatus so that everyone isn’t counting on me when I won’t actually do shit.
I realized I was burnt out when one night (I probably had been drinking), I thought about everything that’s fucked up about the world and all the inequality and cruelty and how insurmountable all the fuckery is. And I just felt crushed. I think I may have even cried.
So, yeah. Fucking burnt out. How weird.
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Tags: activism, burnout
Johns might become felons.
Illinois HB 6195 is a bill to increase the penalty for soliciting a prostitute to a felony. It’s part of this whole end demand in Illinois campaign. You’ll be hearing a lot about this bill from me in the coming months.
Let’s be real for a minute. I think shit like trafficking and coercion are fucking abhorrent. I also think that the proliferation of rhetoric around these issues has pretty much eclipsed any kind of ability we could possibly have to actually grasp what we mean when we say “trafficking” or “coercion”.
I’m pretty sick of the exploitation versus empowerment paradigm when talking about the sex industry. I’ve made a decision to not engage with it, actually, because of how pissed off it makes me. And how much it’s nothing but rhetoric that doesn’t get anyone anywhere.
My concern is that the people pushing for this bill are not engaging with the consequences of making a lot of people into felons. I also think this kind of political maneuvering is just that: a political maneuver. It doesn’t address the myriad of problems and oppressions and resistance strategies among sex workers.
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Tags: abolition, hb 6195, law, sex work
Prostitution: doing versus being
So there’s a proposed change to the legislation in Illinois to increase penalties for pimping and soliciting or patronizing. I don’t feel like getting into why more laws doesn’t mean better right now, but I wanted to document a phenomenon I noticed.
In Illinois, you don’t commit prostitution, you are a prostitute. The criminal code says: “Any person who performs, offers or agrees to perform any act of sexual penetration (defined in sec. 12-12) for any money, property, token, object, or article or anything of value, or any touching or fondling of the sex organs of one person by another person for any money, property, token, object, or article or anything of value for the purpose of sexual gratification”.
Compare that to Arizona: “‘Prostitution’ means engaging in or agreeing or offering to engage in sexual conduct under a fee arrangement with any person for money or any other valuable consideration.”
What’s that about? Why in some states do you commit prostitution and why in some states are you a prostitute?
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Tags: law, prostitution, sex work
Home repairs
I could make a whole blog bitching about other blogs. (Wait, have I?) Exhibit A: a post on Feministing about home repairs. The post struck me as gee this sucks, but help me brainstorm solutions. The author chimed in on the comment threads to say that no one was acknowledging sexism and making it all about her to fix. Which rubbed me the wrong way. And then got me thinking.
Home repairs are typically guy things, yeah? For all my mother’s weird anti-feminist, Christian fundementalism, she always expected me to do shit myself. Why pay someone for shit you can do yourself? It was often an issue of my family simply not being able to afford a contractor to re-tile the bathroom or re-carpet the living room. I learned when I first started driving how to change my own oil.
And pretty much everything else I’ve learned how to do I did by just doing it. Oddly enough, not in spite of sexism, but because of sexism. I hate dealing with repair-dudes and car mechanic-dudes. I wooed my lady over (I hope) by fixing her toilet. And that was just by buying the shit for the toilet and working it out.
So the whole thing kind of begs the question of structure versus agency: the structure of home repair is sexist, while the subversive woman learns to do shit herself. At least that is the structure of the argument. But I don’t know how much agency we all have individually and I don’t know how much we can blame to structure for not figuring shit out ourselves.
I guess this is also the place to talk about my antithetical belief to figuring it the fuck out: why do it when you can pay someone? Weird, huh? This one comes from my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who was married to an electrician. It was in her self-interest that people not try to rewire themselves! So I feel like I have a toolkit that lets me figure shit out when I want to (fixing the toilet of the woman I am trying to woo) and pay for it when I want to (which would be shit like changing my oil because goddamn is my garage nasty).
Hell, if people did “it” themselves all the time, I’d be out of a job! (Obvious sex work joke.)
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Tags: do it yourself, feminism, sexism
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