I forgot to update about this! That thing I do about how no one wants to listen because I’m an uncredentialed whore? Well, now I can only bitch about no one wanting to listen because I’m a whore. Woo! for increasing my privilege. And, you know, achieving something super important to me personally after working hard for it.

I’ve been grappling with this a lot lately. On one hand, those most involved in sex workers’ rights are those with more privilege (economically, educationally, racially), while on the other hand, privilege is used to discount their arguments and experiences. I’m struggling to find a way that acknowledges my privilege without completely negating what I have to say.

Part of this is the fact that most people, when I try to make a point, immediately go to the place where they want to talk about how most sex workers are coerced, abused, etc. Which makes many of us go to the place of completely talking up our own agency in being sex workers. And I think this is a terrible approach. The problem isn’t that we’re privileged and can’t speak for all sex workers. The problem is that privilege really shapes the experience of sex work. We’re all affected by the laws that criminalize and the stigmas that shame our work. But some are more than others.

So if all I hear is that I can’t speak for all sex workers in response to my statements about my experiences, I feel like my point is being missed. Of fucking course I can’t speak for all sex workers! There is not one single fucking universal statement that applies to all sex workers (other than that we’re real people with real lives and feelings).

The point is that we need to develop a comprehensive solution that equalizes the playing field and negates the affects of privilege.

One thing I really want to have a conversation about is the fact that yes, I entered sex work when I was actively first seeking treatment for a life-threatening mental illness. I was your stereotypical crazy girl when I started. But I also want to talk about the fact that sex work was one of the ways in which I was able to learn to appreciate my body and develop the strength to stand on my own two feet. Those early experiences taught me that sex work is neither exploitative or empowering. It can be both simultaneously.

So yes, I am privileged. I can’t speak for all sex workers. But no one can.

Okay on the scale of dinner with Catherine MacKinnon to buying a new sex toy, how horrible or awesome would a post on Feministing about whorephobia be?

I keep thinking about this because I find that site incredibly whorephobic and completely dissing of whores in general. I’ve tried to post before, but my post got stuck in moderation. Or something. Maybe the author didn’t like an actual whore commenting.

I’m thinking of this because there have been posts there lately calling out transphobia and ableism. But every post I see mentioning sex work derails into whorephobia.

I basically would say: hey, listen, it’s not free choice or total oppression and rape. It’s all very, very complicated, and making assumptions about sex workers or silencing them is pretty fucking stupid.

I just wanted to link to this fabulous post by Snowdrop about the problems with these models, especially as Illinois considers this.

As a whore, I just have to say, as happy as I am about not risking a prostitution arrest, the kind of work I do still puts me at risk of an assault charge (apparently the law doesn’t like consensual flogging!). But I have to say, as well, as a whore, I really, really don’t want demand to be ended for my services because, ya know, I have fucking bills to pay. I’m not a sex worker simply because I like pissing on men. If that’s all I wanted to do, I’d play the scene. I’m a sex worker because I need the fucking (or, as Butters would say, motherfucking) money.

I first read Susan Bordo when I was thinking about recovery, trying to make sense of my own experiences. Unbearable Weight put into words the seething rage I felt over my treatment at the hands of others. First, I developed a (biologically rooted) illness that was a manifestation of the expectations of my body, then I was ostracized, locked up, and made to feel like a flawed, damaged human. Not even human. Half a human. Bordo writes about how the anorectic is performing a political protest without realizing it. Perhaps my years wearing my angst prepared me to become an activist.

I’ve been shoe-horned into a lot of clinical diagnoses. The one that has always struck me most is borderline personality disorder. The majority of people diagnosed BPD are women. But to me, it seems as though society first constructs and then punishes when it comes to mental illness. You must conform, but you must not conform so well.

One of the diagnostic criteria for BPD is promiscuity. This came up frequently with the (man) therapist I had who liked to diagnose me BPD. He was more interested in who I was doing what with than I was. And now that I am removed from the situation, I find it fascinating. A woman exploring her sexuality is pathological on a clinic level. I was eighteen and trying to figure out my sexual desires. How many people does a girl have to fuck to be promiscuous? Now how many does a guy?

This is perhaps an obvious example. Take the criteria of fear of abandonment, unstable relationships, unstable and reactive mood, and inappropriate anger. As women, we must be nurturing and giving. We must not want for ourselves. We must not voice dissent or anger. Yet there is the archetype of the psychotic bitch. The Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. I hate you I love you I need you fuck you no I hate myself. Women’s protest is pathological. If we are angry, we are threatening. If we are unstable or sexual, we are threatening.

I had a fight once with a guy I was sleeping with. He lied to me; I confronted him. Instead of the rational, adult thing, which is to say, Okay, you caught me, he told me in elaborate, thorough descriptions what a crazy bitch I am, how much of a fucking psycho. I had stepped out of bounds by asserting my right to the truth with a guy who I was fucking. Because I am a woman, it was crazy, not justified.

You hear all the time about how prevalent depression and anxiety are among women. We are constantly unfulfilled, sad, worried. Caroline Knapp described the deep and unsatisfied desires of women in her book Appetites. Perhaps we are all such a sorry sort of creatures because we have fostered desires which society denies us. I see a parallel between the slew of drugs for women’s mental illnesses and the Mommy’s Little Helper valium of the bored housewife post-war era.

Before I go any further, I’d like to put out that I am not at all suggesting that mental illness is all in a woman’s head. That it’s something society creates in the hapless dupes of culture. Rather, I think that mental illness has an underlying biological component, genetics often, but the ways in which women’s mental illness is perceived by the larger society is completely different than how men are perceived. Mental illness, which is biological, is gendered, like sex characteristics. There is a physical, biological reality, but then all kinds of social forces create meanings out of them. I am not a woman because I have breasts and a vagina. I have breasts and a vagina, and I have learned that these must mean I am a woman. Similarly, I have a certain genetic and biological predisposition. The state of culture guided how I expressed this predisposition, and then society interprets my expressions.

Take for example my battle with self-injury. Women are taught that we must be clean and neat. We must be passive. Even in a society where little girls join sports teams and do mixed marital arts, we are still taught not to want too much, as Knapp writes. Our energy is directed inward, while men are encouraged to be “macho” and outward, sometimes aggressive and violent. There are men on MTV who have become rich and famous for inflicting on themselves the same kind of abuse I inflicted on myself. The internet is filled with videos of boys and men having bloody, violent sporting accidents. Yet that is part of growing up as a boy. A girl who does that, who channels her anger at herself, is pathological.

I think of the invisibility of sex workers with mental illness. The predominant stereotype of the sex worker is the whore with parent issues, the crazy whore who must enact her sadness through sexual promiscuity, fucking strangers to fill the void. So, understandably, many have distanced themselves from this image. It has been constructed to control women’s behaviors. You don’t want to become that crazy whore, do you? You must be a good girl so that you do not grow up to be a crazy whore.

We must be objects of sexual desire, but we must not be subjects of sexual desire. The subject is the pathological one.

I can’t find a way out of this maze. It’s a tangle, a jumble of historical injustices. When you then also consider the further inequalities experienced by women of color, immigrants, queered sexualities, and so forth, it’s even more dizzying.

I’m probably one of the only people in the world who enjoyed the movie Anatomy of Hell. There is a moment in that film that I think is utterly brilliant and illustrates how I feel about this. The woman is in a club. She is hiding in a bathroom, and she cuts herself on the thigh. The man comes in, sees her, and demands to know why she is doing that. She replies simply, “Because I am a woman.”

The woman is dirty, dangerous, sexual, mad, unstable, erratic, completely raw emotion, reducable to her body. As a result, an entire industry has built up around policing women’s behaviors. We must be good girls, or we are mad. Jane Ussher’s Women’s Madness is another book that has shaped my thoughts on this subject. I read it before I was even interested in recovery. A feminist psychoanalyst, Ussher writes of the many ways in which madness and being a woman go hand and hand. Again, it would be just plain naive of me to suggest that crazy is all in our heads. The perception of our crazy is shaped by how society views us as women.

I carry with me the physical reminders and the internal terror of being forcibly committed, of having a stranger sneer at me that I am out of control. Of having the one thing I had to keep order in my otherwise chaotic world override everything else I was to just one thing: a crazy girl. In many ways, I will always be a crazy girl. Only now, I refused to be ashamed. Shame silences. I want to start a dialogue. I want all of us crazy girls to continue a conversation.

You know, I have to say, I’m getting really fucking sick of being told by so-called feminists that I don’t know shit about my own experiences. When I talk about sex work and my experiences, I’m not trying to generalize, I’m not trying to downplay that I have privilege, I’m not trying to act that horrible things don’t happen. I’m just trying to talk about my life as I have lived it. And it would be really fucking awesome if y’all could shut the hell up for once and listen to me. Listen to all of us. Unless you’ve lived it, you don’t know as much as you think you do.

I would never dare tell someone who was victimized in this industry that those experiences weren’t validate. So those of you so-called feminists who haven’t lived my experiences, don’t tell me that.

Jesus. I just find it so frustrating that unless you’re like a transnational woman of color lesbian trafficked person abuse survivor, you can’t talk about sex work. And even if you are that person, you can’t talk about sex work because your story is co-opted by the Cause to Save the Prostituted Women.

All right, I’ll say it. Chicago didn’t get the Olympic bid and I am happy about it. The traffic and infrastructure problems would have been a nightmare to deal with. My business would get fucked up. Not to mention that this city can’t afford the games and they’d kick out all the poor black people on the South Side.

I have been dropping a lot of balls lately. I don’t mean to be. I feel awful about it. And yet I am struck by the salience of stigma in why I can’t explain to others why exactly I’m sucking at life right now.

When I had surgery recently, it was totally cool for me to drop balls because I had unexpected complications and was in pain. I could explain this to people, to clients, as to why I was such a fucking failure.

Now I’m dropping balls all over the place because my doctor put me on a new medication for my anxiety and, rather than helping, it has plummeted me into depression. I just don’t care enough to get out of bed.

And while I’m going to be okay and I’ll find a medication that works and I am resilient and blah blah fucking blah, it’s kind of a pain in my ass that I can’t really explain what’s going on. Who wants the crazy person handling important things? Who wants to employ the services of a crazy whore? Sure, those closest to me know, but that’s not who I’m going to burn bridges with if I can’t be arsed to get out of bed that day.

My problem right now has everything to do with biology and medication side effects, but because it’s psychiatric in nature, it’s somehow different.

I’m going to write about women and mental illness, a long, involved post, but I can’t right now. I need to get my own head on straight and not write “emotionally” (which, that I even have to do that, pisses me off). In the mean time, check out Amber’s awesome post.

I occasionally read Feministing, but I avoid commenting there. I do comment at Feministe. But not Feministing. I’ve seen one too many sex workers torn apart by the commentors of this “feminist” website for being too “privileged” or what the fuck ever.

This post is an excellent fucking example. A dude, not a typical client, runs into an escort, talks to her, and has this feminist revelation that not all sex workers are these stupid, crack-addicted, HIV-riddled, reliving-their-abuse, down-and-out victims. Something that people like me and my fellow activists have been saying for a long fucking time. Something I’ve seen sex workers say in Feministing discussion threads before.

But since I’m just a sex worker blogger and not someone trafficked in a brothel in the Third World, I don’t know anything about “real” sex worker, so I should just shut the fuck up.