"Over the past year, there have been a number of headline-grabbing legal changes in the US, such as the legalization of marijuana in CO and WA, as well as the legalization of same-sex marriage in a growing number of US states.

As a majority of people in these states apparently favor these changes, advocates for the US democratic process cite these legal victories as examples of how the system can provide real freedoms to those who engage with it through lawful means. And it’s true, the bills did pass.

What’s often overlooked, however, is that these legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.

The state of Minnesota, for instance, legalized same-sex marriage this year, but sodomy laws had effectively made homosexuality itself completely illegal in that state until 2001. Likewise, before the recent changes making marijuana legal for personal use in WA and CO, it was obviously not legal for personal use.

Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100% effective, such that any potential law offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed. If perfect law enforcement had been a reality in MN, CO, and WA since their founding in the 1850s, it seems quite unlikely that these recent changes would have ever come to pass. How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same sex marriage should be permitted, if nobody had ever seen or participated in a same sex relationship?"

-- Moxie Marlinspike in We Should All Have Something To Hide on thoughtcrime.org

There's been a distinct annoyance that has subtly and not-so-subtly been plaguing me since I decided to start moving out of the porn industry and into a new career.  There's a new belief held about me by my family, and even a few of my acquaintances.

I'm talking about the belief that I'm finally getting my shit together, as evidenced by the fact that I'm becoming an adult and getting a real job.  No longer am I frittering away my talents and intellect on something as stupid as porn, I'm now working on making something of myself.

I don't think anyone has phrased it quite like that, but there's been a pervasive, condescending sort of encouragement (very loudly from family members) that can really get to me at times.  My dad and two of my cousins think it's awesome that I run porn sites, but the rest of my family has always had varying degrees of quiet embarrassment about the issue.  During the holidays, I might have been asked in an obligatory manner, "So, how's that, uh, business of yours?", but I know they don't really care about the answer.  Today, though, everyone seems proud of my big decision.  I'm a big girl now!

This "support" is part of our cultural narrative that says sex work is a career of last resort, laziness, and above all, a refusal to "grow up."  I ran my own successful small business for a decade, traveled the world, and even bought a home, but these typical markers of middle-class American success aren't considered sufficient evidence that my job was "real."  No, it's only real work if it doesn't involve taking off your clothes.  I didn't magically win the lottery, I've worked hard for what I have, and I'll always be incredibly proud of that.  The flexible schedule and freedom that comes with being a sex worker is treated not like something I earned through tenacity and smart business planning, but is somehow emblematic of a refusal to make serious decisions.

I have grown to loathe the stereotype that leaving sex work means that you're getting your shit together, because for me, it's so hilariously ironic.  Starting over at the bottom, learning an entirely new set of skills, taking a pay cut, stressing out about money and career opportunities?  To me, that's not getting my shit together; leaving sex work is letting my shit completely fall apart.  I know that mine is the right choice and that all the grunt work now is going to pay off well in the long-term, but I don't like how my decision is framed (both by family and society) as mature and responsible solely because I'm moving from a sexual related career to a nonsexual one.  I don't like having this extra moral dimension projected onto my transition, one that I certainly wouldn't attract were I switching from being a chef to a librarian, or a lawyer to an investment banker.

This isn't to say that it's wrong to be happy for a sex worker friend who has made a decision to switch a new career.  Be happy for them, be supportive, be encouraging - just be conscious of how you frame that support.  Respect that for many sex workers, each of our careers are equally awesome and valid, and that our leaving sex work shouldn't be treated like breaking free from a harmful habit or childish diversion.

Yesterday, I went out to lunch with one of my nerdy friends from my new "straight life."  (He's the only person in that sphere who knows that I've been working in porn for the last decade, a "big reveal" that I decided to allow to organically manifest itself in conversation as though it were nothing bizarre or noteworthy.)  On our break, we lamented how frustrating it is to have to work with people you can't stand, or to make smalltalk about the weather because that's considered polite.

"I went to a big university, so if I didn't like someone, I'd never have to interact with them again.  I could completely choose who was in my social circle."

"I've spent a decade running my own business, so I haven't been forced to spend time with people I don't like.  I can jettison anyone, and it didn't matter to my bottom line.  Now, I'm making an effort to not rock the boat because I'm the lowest person on the ladder and I need the good reference for later."

"It's so frustrating..."

"...now that we have to have to completely relearn our social skills."

We laughed, but it's true.  One of the things I've been dealing with as I've been moving out of the sex industry is a longing for the shocking degree of freedom one has as a sex worker.  Even if you're not fully running your own business the way I have been, sex workers generally have the ability to reject clients, to move to another strip club, find a new escort service, work for a different studio, and overall, set a much greater number of boundaries than your average worker.  While that statement seems bizarre - how can you have "boundaries" if a stranger can see your naked body or is even having sex with you? - boundaries come in more forms than ones based on chastity.

With the vast, vast majority of jobs, a worker has very little control over their working environment, boss, coworkers, and upward mobility potential.  A typical waitress doesn't show up to shifts only on days she feels like working, bouncing between various restaurants depending on which she prefers at the moment, the way a stripper might.  A nurse knows he'll never be able to start his own hospital and declare himself its chief of surgery, unlike a porn star who works hard and invests his money in starting his own production company.  For all the endless criticism lobbed at the sex industry for being a measure of last resort and misery, there's a huge and unrecognized amount of freedom in it, both freedom of association and the ability for your hard work to propel you upwards. The sex industry is the true "American dream," in that tenacity, hard work, and creativity can take a person (usually with no formal training and little startup capital) from poverty to the middle class more easily than any other industry.

One of the things I've been thinking about more lately is the issue of "association privilege," both how I've been lucky to have it as a sex worker, and how it remains perhaps the most invisible privilege.  When framed in that way, it makes obvious a particularly strong correlation between the shrill lefty feminists who rail endlessly about how everyone is too "privileged," yet themselves possessing the privilege to choose their work environment, bosses/editors, and business/activist contacts.  (I've long maintained that nothing is more indicative of privilege than spending all day on the internet picking fights with strangers about how privileged they are.)   If someone wants to refuse to associate with anyone who isn't also a socialist feminist wannabe-academic that adorns their virtual spaces with Audre Lorde quotes and Foucault references, they can easily live in such a bubble.  There are plenty of such bores in neighboring regions of the blogosphere.  (Where all of these people make money remains a mystery.  While I know that two big names in the sexy feminist scene have secret rich male partners/husbands who bankroll their lifestyles of being internet pesonas, I don't know how the others do it.  NGO jobs?  Sporadic paid writing gigs?  Trust funds?  Secret sex work?)

It all reminds me of a favorite section from a piece in The Atlantic a while back, which perfectly sums up the completely un-checked privilege that runs rampant among those who have declared themselves the enforcers of privilege-checking.

According to [UC Berkeley sociologist Neil] Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment,

mainly because the vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have “real” jobs—professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities.

Many of them can set their own hours, choose their own workspace, get paid for thinking about issues that interest them, and, as a bonus, get to feel, by virtue of their career, important in the world. The professor admits that his own job in “university teaching is by and large divorced from the normal discipline of everyday life in the marketplace. It bears only the faintest resemblance to most work in the real world.” In other words, for the “occupational elite” (as Gilbert calls this group), unlike for most people, going to work is not a drag.

As an impolitic creature by nature (or hateful cunt, depending on who you ask), I've greatly enjoyed being in the "occupational elite" myself.  As I shed this awesome privilege in order to start over, I wonder how many people in the world I'm leaving  - both sex workers and/or feminists - realize the degree to which they hold this significant privilege themselves.  Enjoy it while it lasts, because you'll miss it like crazy when you're making obligatory workplace smalltalk with people with whom you have little in common.

I've noticed my local government's anti-trafficking ads on the sides of buses, but haven't mentioned them on my blog.  Then I really saw one yesterday that did something I have never, ever seen before from a mainstream anti-trafficking campaign: declare that women can be traffickers and men can be victims.  Sure, this dynamic is no shocker to people who actually know anything about migrant labor, but to see it in a county-funded ad campaign blew me away.

King County's anti-trafficking campaign has many flaws, of course, but I will say that I appreciate that the ads are not just about sex slavery.  The campaign uses the Polaris Project, a Christian morality NGO as a "fact" source; is partnered with the Somaly Mam Foundation, which sends Cambodian sex workers to private prisons where they are sexually abused; and links to a Shared Hope International anti-prostitution page as a resource.  So the campaign is deeply problematic and based in the lies of anti-sex worker hysterics and religious nuts, and I'm not defending that.

But I think this is still a tiny, possibly hopeful step in the right direction, because the campaign is about the many faces of forced trafficking, not just the sexy sex trafficking for sexy sexual abuse thing that we normally see.  There are three ad designs, and only one is about sex trafficking.  The other two imply domestic labor.

Much has been made over the years of feminist academics' use of images of sex workers without their permission for the purposes of belittling the featured sex worker and campaigning for their criminalization and public shaming.  I found out that a photo of me has made it into an academic's lecture slides, but not in a class on navel-gazing feelingsy bullshit.

A friend of mine recently sent me a slide from a class on genetics he's taking, but asked me to not post the details about his school.  (I told him that rather than seeking anonymity, he should have hollered out, "I banged that chick!" during the lecture.)  Maybe I should be offended that I'm not credited, but I find it amusing that I am being used as an example when discussing human body hair growth patterns.  (If I'm going to make it into the halls of academia, better a scientific example than a target of feminist hatred.)  I'm pretty sure that's not my bush, I'm just the armpit example.

I am pleased to see that a new fight is gearing up against the United States' horrible 2257 regulations, and I want to tell my readers about why "a porn regulation" should matter to them as sex workers, sex workers' rights activists, and privacy rights supporters.

"2257" is shorthand for the numerical code of the irritatingly-named Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act.  You can read about it in detail on Wikipedia, but the short of it is that when you appear in adult productions in the US, you as the performer/model must give the production company/photographer two forms of identification and sign a bunch of paperwork promising that you are over 18.  (Which is its own absurdity, because there have been a few instances of 16 or 17 year olds getting fake IDs to work in porn, and any contract a minor signs is void anyway.  The contract doesn't do a thing to guarantee age, and does not prevent a determined teenager from working in porn.  It's the producer who is punished, even if they do everything they possibly can to screen out a lying underage worker.)  2257 laws, like all ridiculous, anti-privacy, anti-free speech measures, are "to save the children."

There are many good reasons to oppose 2257 regulations as they stand now, not the least of which is that it's an attempt by the government to strangle the sex industry and stifle sexual expression online through red tape and excessive paperwork-keeping requirements.  As someone who both appears in and produces online porn, 2257 is a problem from all sides for me, but there are two facets which I oppose the most.  (I covered this topic in my talk in privacy at the 2010 Desiree Alliance conference, and I really wish more sex workers understood what happens to their information once they sign waivers and let their IDs be photocopied.)

First off, 2257 laws are a horrifying problem in terms of privacy for models and performers.  I am required to keep records of the name and legal address of all people who appear on my websites, and to keep copies of two forms of ID, one of which must be government-issued and have a photo.  If I pay them over $600 US in a year, I am required to note their social security number for tax purposes.  I am required to keep these model releases and IDs organized by legal names and stage names, and where the images appear.  I am required to have these records available for inspection by the federal government to prove that my web sites are not actually filled with child pornography.

As a small-scale pornographer who only produces exclusive content, I keep all of these records to myself, but with the vast majority of porn, content is shot with the purpose of re-selling and licensing it out to many sources, which means a performer who thinks they are entrusting their name to one photographer may end up giving it to hundreds of people.  Any random person can search for companies reselling and licensing adult content, and with a purchase, buy performer's legal names, social security numbers, and addresses.  I've even seen online content sellers that allow new customers to try their content for free, meaning they are literally just handing out copies of performer's personally-identifying data to anyone who asks.  This should rightly scare anyone who has ever signed a model release for an adult company.  I even hesitate to talk about it this part of the porn industry publicly, because it's the easiest way for a stalker to find a porn performer.  It's not as easy as Googling, "Sally Sweetsucker home address," but a determined stalker can comb through enough adult content resellers and have a good shot at finding their target.

My second main problem with 2257 as a small-scale pornographer is that I am required by law to list my legal name and home address (because that is my business location and primary place of production) on the front page of my web sites.  (This is not allowed to be a PO box or an office you rent just for the purpose of record-keeping.  It has to be staffed during business hours, and where you actually shoot your content.  That might work for a big studio with a building with security, but not for small-timers.)  In my decade in the business, I have only ever met one small-scale producer that complied with that portion of 2257 regulations, and I was shocked that they did.  Independent pornographers and sex workers like myself should not have to choose between a fear of federal prosecutions and prison time for violating this aspect of 2257 laws, and a fear of overzealous stalkers coming to our homes to rape or assault us. When I started in 2002, it was allowed to have an attorney serve as the official record-keeper of your 2257 documentation, but that changed years ago during the Bush administration.  Many small-scale pornographers simply pulled out and found new jobs, too scared of making the horrible choice of federal prison or being attacked by stalkers.  No one should have to make that choice.  No one should be put in such an extreme a lose-lose position.

There have been legal challenges in the past to 2257 laws, but the fight continues.  The Free Speech Coalition has launched a new web site asking for help funding their battle, and you should support it.  2257 laws endanger the lives and safety of sex workers, but this issue is never discussed in sex worker advocacy circles.  Porn production regulations are more institutionalized and abstract that the immediate concerns of escorts/prostitutes/etc who fear arrest, assault, and rape, but it's just as real, as just as serious.  Please support the effort to fight against 2257 laws, and spread the word.

I only had a handful of online interactions with Shannon Larratt, but I admired him, and I am saddened to hear from our mutual friend Bella Vendetta that he has taken his own life after years of struggling with the pain of a degenerative medical condition.  You can read his farewell blog post here.

Shannon Larratt isn't a household name by any means, but if you're someone who knows your stuff about porn, kink, body modification, subculture, and "the extreme and weird," he was an icon.  I've been ranting a lot recently about the feminist porn and sex-positivity scenes for their self-absorbed nature, endlessly lavishing praise on themselves about how "revolutionary" they are for owning vibrators or publishing punk pinups.  Hearing of Shannon's death makes their silly claims ring all the more hollow and insulting.

Shannon wasn't a pornographer, but he was a true pioneer when it comes to explicit imagery and pushing the bounds of freedom of expression.  As the founder of BMEzine, a long-running body modification community, Shannon boldly published the most "extreme" and "shocking" imagery on the web: the "BME Hard" section of his web site contained photos of voluntary castration, cliterodectomy, nipple removals, testicles turned into pincushions, and just about everything "weird" that a person could do to their body and genitals.  (While most of what was published in the BME Hard category isn't my "thing," I fervently defend everyone's right to modify their body as they see fit, and to use their bodies as a canvas of personal expression, experimentation, connection, and sexual fulfillment.)  For his work in pushing the envelope and putting himself at risk of obscenity prosecutions, we are all in Shannon's debt, whether we are pornographers, kinksters, artists, body mod practitioners, or just people who don't believe in censorship.

When I wanted to launch one of the web's only menstruation porn sites back in 2005, EroticRed.com, Shannon was the person I looked to to answer the question, "Who the hell is going to be willing to process credit card payments for something this weird?"  (All credit card companies and intermediary banks have policies about what you are allowed to sell while using their services, which almost always prohibit porn that features blood.  So, if you're doing something banned, you hop around from sketchy startup biller to sketchy startup biller as you wait for them to get shut down by their own upstream banking providers.)  It was Shannon who connected me to a billing processor so that my site could become a reality.  While that billing processor did eventually go under, as do all the billers for "extreme" imagery, I never would have been able to get my project launched otherwise.  Shannon and I shared the frustration of credit card companies enacting censorship policies against our work, all long before WikiLeaks named and popularized the concept of a corporate "banking blockade" against material deemed socially unacceptable.

Goodbye, Shannon.  As a fellow publisher of the "extreme" and passionate believer in bodily autonomy and freedom of expression, I owe you one.  Thank you so much for everything you've contributed to the world.  To my readers: I want you to know who Shannon Larratt was, and I want you to know that if you're someone out there on the fringes, he may have helped pave the way for you.

I know, I know - Annie Hall came out in 1977, but in keeping with my belief that everything you need to know about life, you've already learned from movies you watched growing up, I wanted to share a favorite scene.  Woody Allen and his date are stuck in line with a man loudly sharing his profound philosophical insights on what Marshall McLuhan would think about something.  As sex workers, we've all been subjected to hearing blowhards drone on and on about "what it's like to be a sex worker," especially from academics, so seeing this scene made me laugh.

If only life were only like this, indeed.

"For example, while the [UN] draft resolution [on women's rights] doesn’t call for providing protection or respect for prostitutes, it does call for ending violence against all women, which would include the minority that work in prostitution.  Those women, while their job may be deemed immoral or illegal in certain countries, deserve protection from violence like any other human being or citizen of their country, a fact which the MB seems to take issue with.  Aside from using religion to oppose equality between men and women, they are even advocating dehumanizing - in the sense of deeming them unworthy of their human rights - those they consider morally bankrupt, like lesbians or prostitutes.  Protecting these two subgroups of citizens from violence is against Islam according to the MB, and therefore shouldn't be allowed."

-- Mahmoud Salem (aka @Sandmonkey) in Gender Wars: The Muslim Brotherhood Versus Egypt's Women on acus.org.  He's my favorite Egyptian blogger/activist/self-proclaimed "pain in the ass," and it's been interesting watching a revolution/coup unfold and through his eyes.

Last night, the feminist porn bubble erupted in girlie squeals of "OMG, a cute boy looked at us!" on Twitter because it has found a new celebrity hero: Justin Timberlake.  In a skit on Saturday Night Live, a character Timberlake was playing made a joking reference to feminist porn, which the feminist porn scene have been quick to appropriate (inaccurately) as some sort of serious celebrity endorsement of their genre, with Tristan Taormino now using Timberlake's face with the line from the SNL joke as marketing for her latest book.  An image of Timberlake's face and the quote is currently being widely retweeted, reblogged, and celebrated as a victory.  (On what planet does a joke on SNL constitute a celebrity's endorsement and interest in you using their image to sell you products, anyway?  Should the piss porn genre should start using Patrick Stewart's face to sell their products because he once did a skit on SNL where he played a man turned on by women urinating?)

However, implying a celebrity endorsement of your products where none exists and using their image without their permission so you can make money isn't why I take issue with Taormino and others fawning all over Timberlake.  (Though those are perfectly problematic issues in themselves.)

Really?  I oppose feminist porn because I know how to treat a lady right.

Timberlake was one of the celebrities who appeared in advertisements for the now-defunct Demi N Ashton Foundation, an anti-sex worker organization that regurgitated the same old lies about how the average age of entering the sex industry is 12, and how a whopping 1% of the population of America are trafficked child sex slaves.  If you follow sex workers' rights issues even in the most passing way, you'd remember what a big deal this celebrity-led campaign was, and how it launched the biggest-yet mainstream media coverage of the rescue industry in the form of a series of Village Voice articles debunking the Foundation's claims.  Like it or not, celebrities get more attention that any normal person ever could, including most politicians, so when celebrities pick up a cause as a trendy new way of earning themselves some good PR, millions of people will hear about that cause.  It's because of the instant credibility which Americans assign to celebrities that their campaigns have so much power to undermine grownup-level conversations like sex workers' rights.  I'm infuriated that Tristan Taormino and the rest of the sexy feminist team are currently heroizing a man who was very recently making the rounds as an anti-sex worker campaigner.  Justin Timberlake has contributed to setting the sex workers' rights movement back by popularizing the worst lies about us, and no amount of jokes about porn can right that wrong.  Feminists like Taormino couldn't care less about Timberlake's anti-sex worker activism, though, apparently finding it perfectly acceptable to throw normal sex workers under the bus so they can grasp desperately at the exciting straw of a celebrity knowing their porn genre exists.

This spat with an obtuse feminist pornographer reminds me of why I hate the feminist porn genre so much.  No, not the products it makes, since I think a lot of it is sexy, but the way the genre works.  It adds insult to injury that so many people see feminist porn as an extension of and solution to sex workers' rights, when it's really an obstacle.

Feminist porn is the anti-sex worker sex work, and its marketing commonly slams other sex workers and their appearance.  One of the first feminist porn sites was Nakkid Nerds, whose motto was "Smarter than your average porn star," and it's only gone downhill ever since.  Feminist porn has an aesthetic, and that aesthetic is marketed as the definition of being "empowered," as though a woman's intelligence and value as a human being is to be judged solely by whether or not she has tattoos and thick-rimmed hipster glasses.  I can't tell you how many times I have seen feminist porn marketed with insults, catty little jabs about how their company doesn't have those brain-dead bleach-blonde drugged-up bimbos you see in regular porn, it has artists and lovers and manic pixie dream girls.  As someone who makes porn with a similar "not traditional beauty standards" aesthetic, I have always tried to avoid that kind of vicious marketing copy, and while I do want to differentiate myself from a mainstream porn site, I prefer to use terms like, "not another cookie-cutter porn site," rather than launch an attack on how mainstream porn performers are ugly and stupid.  You don't have to insult the appearances and intelligence of other sex workers to show that you're different, but it's endemic to feminist porn.

Feminist porn excludes normal sex workers by screening out applications from anyone who dares to be motivated by money, and the genre has long been inconsistent when it comes to actually paying performers.  Feminist porn sites try and avoid hiring people who are "just in it for the money," as though there's nothing more disgusting than being a sex worker.  One of the largest feminist porn companies used to openly claim that you could only get paid modeling work if you did some free work, so they could deter those awful people who were in it for the money.  Another famous feminist porn director is renowned for financially screwing over her performers by trying to talk them down to accepting a lower payment after they've already shown up for work, or have already performed their scene, or simply not paying them at all.  Most feminist porn sites start not with some investment capital, but by asking performers to donate their labor on the vague promise that they will be paid if and when the site ever makes a profit.  (And many sites fail, which leaves a lot of hurt feelings.)  I've watched as this business model has lead to plenty of behind-the-scene drama over the years when models don't get paid.  This is not just about one feminist porn company, it's how the genre works.  This financially exploitative relationship to workers is their normal, and it only continues to work because there will always be plenty of cute college-age punks and hipsters who are motivated by the fun and rebellious aspect of the porn industry, but aren't trying to make it a reliable source of income.  Many feminist porn sites also expect workers to donate unpaid labor in the form of writing blogs for the site, participating in the site's online forums and flirting with paying subscribers, responding to fan emails, and doing member chats.  Those precious "social networking" and "community" features, of which the feminist porn genre is so proud, are built on the labor of unpaid workers, who are well aware that doing free work might lead to being hired for paid work again.

Feminist porn splashes the word "revolutionary" all over everything it does.  This might seem like I'm nitpicking semantics here, but I take deep offense to corporations using the term "revolution" in order to sell things.  After all, let's not forget that feminist porn is a business, and as a business, its goal is to make money.  It's fine by me to make money, I like making money, too, but I would never insult all the peoples of the world who have engaged in lengthy and costly life-or-death struggles by touting my collection of tit pics a "revolution."  Using that word to market entertainment products shows a profound ignorance of and giggly insensitivity towards countless historical and global struggles where vast numbers of oppressed people have died in horrible ways while fighting for freedoms like ending racial segregation, to buck off colonialism, or to overthrow dictators.  Feminist porn sellers are not "revolutionaries" by any stretch of the imagination.

People who dabble in feminist porn are regularly handed paid speaking gigs at colleges around the country to speak on sex work issues, even though they only rarely engage in sex work, and do so mostly for fun.  This would be akin to having an event about labor organizing for farm workers and hiring as your speaker someone who occasionally helps with a friend's garden on summer weekends.  People are drawn to sex work for all sorts of reasons, and one of them is that it's naughty and exciting, but it's deeply troublesome to have most of the public faces of sex work be feminist porn models who are motivated by an interest in transgressive fun.  The vast, vast majority of sex workers are not in the business primarily for personal growth and sexual fulfillment, so it always bothers me to see such people actively seeking so much attention as sex workers.  I doubt any of these feminist porn dabblers claim to represent all sex workers in their lectures, but that doesn't negate the fact that when the public is handed a token sex worker at an event, they will mentally assign to them the status of "spokesperson for sex workers."  It's because of the fact that representatives are taken as representative that the onus should be on people invited to speak before large groups as a token sex workers to ask themselves, "Am I really the person who should be addressing this group?  Might they be better served by someone who is a full-time sex worker, or who has more experience than I, or who is a more typical sex worker?"  I have refused plenty of chances to be on TV or in the media because I felt like I was not the best spokesperson for whatever a journalist wanted to discuss, and I always referred them to people who are better suited than I.  I've dabbling in pro-domming work, but I certainly wouldn't be marketing myself to universities as someone they should hire to speak to students on what it's like to be a dominatrix.  Dabblers shouldn't be spokespersons, period, but the lure of fame and being able to add "college speaker" to one's resume is too irresistible to feminist porn people.

And the biggest one: feminist porn hinges on the idea that sex work is only ethical or acceptable if it's done by people who are doing it primarily for personal fulfillment.  This "let them eat cake" attitude is such profound bullshit, and it's completely antithetical to the idea of sex workers' rights.  The feminist porn scene trades on (and profits from) marketing copy that implies that sex work is unethical when it's done by normal sex workers, who are no doubt exploited and degraded.  This is so insulting, especially when some of them obtusely throw out the argument that feminist porn is some kind of "solution" to sex workers' rights, as though the millions of sex workers around the world could sustain their incomes by traveling to San Francisco to do a couple of porn shoots a year where they may or may not ever be paid.  (Feminists have deployed a similar argument about how the "solution" to large stage fees and mandatory tipouts in the strip club industry is that everyone instead works at San Francisco's small worker-run Lusty Lady punk/chubby girl strip club where everyone earns an hourly wage.)

Along with decriminalization, the goal of the global sex workers' rights movement is to gain public respect for our work and to be recognized as workers, and feminist porn is fighting for the exact opposite: that sex work is only acceptable if it's done by not-workers for not-money, and that being motivated by money to do sex work is a problem in itself.  Every business needs its marketing angles and to differentiate itself from competitors, but feminist porn needn't put its own profits and feel-good image ahead of the struggles of sex workers to convince the public that selling sexual services is a legitimate job and should be respected as such.  The real insult of all of this is that any advancement in sex workers' rights also benefits feminist porn performers, but feminist porn believes it can only succeed by disparaging other sex workers.

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