It seems like every couple of months, there's a new fear-mongering book being hawked by one of the professional feminists about the vileness of sexual commerce.  A core component of their actual Serious Face critique of the jizz biz is insinuating that we have the totally unique atrociousness of possessing a financial motivation with our jobs.  We in the sex industry work to earn a profit.  We make money.  We get paid to do stuff.  We sell things and services.  Gasp!

This line of attack would be hilarious, if it weren't also so disgusting to see that these types make their living off the backs of sex workers - meaning they are literally nothing more than the most disrespectful and exploitative of pimps.  They spread panic about us to get interviewed on TV.  They use naked photographs of us without permission (in flagrant violation of federal porn statues) during their paid speaking appearances.  They twist our words and purposefully misrepresent our stories in their books.  They draw salaries as the heads of nonprofits who exist to take away our rights.  They make up statistics out of thin air about how awful we are in in order to get donations for their projects.  They receive tenure at fancy universities by lying about us to impressionable students.

They have a financial motivation.  They are out to earn a profit.  They get paid with their book deals and public appearances.  And they're probably better at profiting off the exploitation of sex workers than any pimp or trafficker out there.

There's 10 seconds - a single line of dialog - from Wayne's World that always plays in my head whenever I see professional feminists soliciting for their latest cash-grab.  Now it can can be what plays in your head, too.  This clip is from the middle of a scene of Wayne and Garth ranting about the importance of not selling out, while engaging in product placement.

Last week, I had a pushy customer on cam who went from a "cute begging little boy" routine trying to sweet-talk me into fingering my ass (after I already told him that I don't do anal cam shows), to insulting me and textually yelling at me that I have to finger my ass for him.  While I don't enjoy dealing with people like that, spending time with that dumbass netted me $28 in profit.  I could have kicked him out or insulted him back, but I actually wanted to see how long he'd last so as to extract as much money from him as possible.

I've never gotten so much as 28 cents when regular people (feminists, conservatives, and other irritants) insult and degrade me.  At least when a customer is a rude and obnoxious person, they have the decency to pay me for putting up with them.

I felt like doing a light-hearted blog.  And, that 5% of me that's girlie needed to start a Tumblr.

Go take a gander (and submit photos!) at StuffSexWorkersEat.tumblr.com

I'm a huge fan of food and sex workers, and I think this will make for a nice distraction that satisfies my interest in both, while working towards the political aim of humanizing us.

concern boner kənˈsərn bōnər
noun

Defintion: The state of titillation that results from being able to express concerns about a topic, especially a topic where one's stated views are sensationalistic, ill-informed, and/or shallow enough that they cannot be disagreed with by others.

Usage: Sally had a raging concern boner when she was interviewed on television stating her vehement opposition to forcing small children to become sex slaves.

Related terms: see concern troll.

Oh, violent forced sex trafficking - how you give liberals a raging concern boner!  Since nothing excites a do-gooder quite like the chance to blare their uninformed "down with bad stuff!" opinion on a topic as exciting as forced sex trafficking, the latest Craigslist restrictions have prompted a month-long circle jerk for the self-righteous.

I haven't read all of what's been in the press in the last few weeks, but it's the same script that gets dusted off every few months when there's a "new" sex trafficking panic.  And, because anti-sex worker activists aim to turn all issues into a sex trafficking panic, those types are lined up to regurgitate their morbid sound bites about how all exchanges of sexual energy for cash are basicallythesamething as raping trafficked underage sex slaves.  (And, my side is plenty practiced with our less-heard replies, such as, "Do you have any evidence of any of your claims and statistics?", or "How is it that imprisoning/deporting abused sex workers makes their lives magically all better?", or "Have you ever actually asked these communities of people you claim to be saving what they want?")

Whether it's a conservative news source or a feminist/lefty one, the same cliches and hysteria get repeated without fact-check.  In a year when people on my end of the political spectrum are talking a whole lot about the importance of citing primary source materials in journalism, where's the outcry when the media just completely makes shit up about sex work?

I haven't really written about trafficking and "rescue", and it's not because I'm lazy or trying to avoid unpleasant subjects.  I have the sense to know that if something isn't my area of expertise, I ought to hush and listen to people who are in the know.  I know a bit on the subject, but other people are better teachers.

If you would like to educate yourself about trafficking, I have two homework assignments for you, which can be completed in a weekend.

First, read Laura Agustín's Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets, and the Rescue Industry.  We all have our golden books about a given topic that we recommend on a regular basis, and there's nothing that cuts through the bullshit with a sober, researched, post-colonialist mentality like Sex at the Margins.  I'll let the book's back cover summarize its contents:

This groundbreaking book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims, and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest.

Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' disempowers them.  Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radical analysis.  Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry.  Although they are treated as a marginalised group, they form part of the dynamic of the global economy.

Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire of social justice.

You can read this book over the course of one day - it's weighty subject material, but it's not a huge volume at 194 pages (plus citations/sources/index).  It's worth buying, as you'll probably want to lend it out to your friends.

Secondly, the people impacted by the rescue industry are not lawn chairs - they actually can and do speak out for themselves.  A fair bit of video material has been produced by the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers (primarily about sex workers in Cambodia), and is available for free on the Sex Workers Present Blip.tv station.  Spend a day watching those videos.  Most are not specifically about trafficking, but they will give you a dose of reality with the struggles faced by aggrieved sex workers in the developing world, including protesting being "rescued" and sent to what are tacitly prisons where they may face violence and rape at the hands of those who are supposedly rehabilitating them.  Most of these videos are not light watching, but it's material worth seeing.

If anyone has links to independent accounts (not quotes from anti-sex worker/anti-trafficking groups' own donation-soliciting literature) from people "rescued" while working in the United States, please post them.  I'd appreciate hearing their experiences and learning about what happens when migrant sex workers get "saved" in my country.

Agustín's academic work gives you a good foundation of research and informed theory, and the videos in the Sex Workers Present collection give you real first hand accounts directly from sex workers from developing countries who've faced the brutal end of "rescue" and meddling from outside organizations who claim to be "helping" them.  I consider this to be the your homework if you'd like to have a decent grasp of the issue.

One of the gems I've taken from Mistress Matisse's blog over the years has been her repeated admonishment (though not said in the context of politics) to be wary of how often the word help is just a nice way of saying control.  I think there's no more applicable place than in the world of anti-sex worker activists.  Sure, the line is, "We want to help women escape the sex industry", but what's really being said (and done) is, "We want to control other people's choices about their own bodies and dictate politically correct employment options to people whose complex situations we don't care to understand."

We already have too many do-gooders who presume to know what's best for sex workers, especially poor sex workers, migrant sex workers, and those in developing countries. What sex workers need are allies capable of listening.  So, go read up on the research, and then listen to what sex workers are actually agitating for on their own behalf.  I assure you, it's not that they wish more liberals, NGOs, and celebrities would barge into their lives and dictate how they ought to live.

"My lovely friend — I’ll call her Ophelia.  We both realized that we'd been through bad breakups simultaneously, and clinked glasses.  I told her about what ended the relationship with toxic boy; about him seducing another woman in front of me and walking in on them in bed together.  That I dated him for two months but no one knew; he told me not to blog him, he kept out of public photos with me, didn't want his photo on my blog.  That he'd give me little presents related to my life/work but I couldn’t blog that he gave them to me — even once told me to lie and say they were from someone else.  I told Ophelia about all of this, and she understood.  She especially understood why I let this happen to me; her situation was identical, having dated someone who wanted to be with her, but then wanted everything that made her *her* to change.

Ophelia is an icon in her realm; while I’m a sex blogger, a sex writer, sex educator, and a very public one at that.  And we both *get* boundaries.  But I write about my life *and* my life's work — which is to normalize sex and change the cultural conversation about sex, at least in my generation.  And I’m not ashamed of what I do.

I told Ophelia, it's as if these boys — they're attracted to the persona, the passion for sex culture, the attention, the notoriety, the outspoken and frank nature of the way her and I relate sex to the world, the openness — that's the spark.  I live and breathe sex and blogging and everything that goes with it.  It's oxygen.  Ophelia and I are both public sex personas, which is what attracts people, but then they want to get rid of that.  A killing jar is designed to preserve the insect's appearance."

-- Violet Blue, in kiss me to the ground on tinynibbles.com

(This one is probably my favorite post on Violet's blog.)

In one week, I can now make as much money camming as I'll make in an entire month of operating my small porn sites.  This makes me quite sad in many ways, and I feel like I'm staring down a precipice and deciding which way forward and how to channel my energy into the most productive outlets.  A theme I noticed during this summer's Desiree Alliance conference in both casual discussion and formal talks was that a lot of sex workers are looking to branch out and diversify right now.  We're all asking where the good money is these days, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer.  Here's my piece of the puzzle when it comes to the indie porn and camming worlds.

First, for those unfamiliar, camming is like being an online peepshow performer.  I log in whenever I like, and on the network I use - iFriends - I set my own per-minute rate.  I get half of the $4-a-minute that I charge, so a 10-minute cam show nets me $20 in profit.  I don't make $120 per hour, though - more than half of my time is spent just waiting around for customers.  I have the option to either a) engage in free chat and beg illiterate, pushy cheapskates to buy private shows from me, or b) only let people see me who are already paying customers.  That latter option is the way to go.  So, I sit there, logged in, looking cute, waiting for someone to decide they like my profile image and description, ready to spring to life when someone picks me.  I've been using the in-between time to keep up on sex worker's rights blogs as I wait around for customers, which strikes me as an excellent system of double-dipping.

As someone who started into porn in 2002, camming has never been a huge thing for me until these last few months.  I began occasionally working on iFriends back in 2005, but found that my time was better spent (in the profit-per-hour sense) maintaining my subscription porn sites.  This summer, I've had a lot of expenses, which made me give iFriends a try again.  I wasn't expecting much, but figured, "What the hell?  I'll log in while I'm sitting here reading my RSS feeds anyway."  With the recession in full swing, and the porn industry practically circling the drain, I was surprised to discover that private, pay-per-minute cam shows are selling well.  I'm making as much or more (per hour logged in) as I was before the recession.

What's the explanation for this?  I emailed five other cam performers who also have experience in the porn side of the adult industry.

Isobel Wren (on CamWorld.com) - new to doing cam shows, but involved in nude/alt modeling since 2005 - said that camming is now 60% of her income. "Honestly I wish I'd discovered it earlier, I enjoy the heck out of camming and I really enjoy that I can make a comparable amount of money without traveling across the country, hell, without traveling from my HOUSE!"  She had used to travel for modeling gigs, but "the majority of the people who booked traveling models were hobbiest photographers.  When the recession hit these guys couldn't afford to pay $100 an hour for a model any more."

Mistress Roxxie (on CamModels.com) said, "I previously made more than enough with my websites, but business hasn't been so good and I need to make up that extra income somewhere.  Modeling isn't worth the time and energy I would need to put into it.  I tried doing more pro-domme work, but that industry is saturated."  A sex worker since 2001, she told me that camming is "100% crucial" to making ends meet now.

Adorable Audrey (on NiteFlirt.com) has been involved in amateur porn sites for around ten years.  "Camming was a little less than half my income before the recession, and about 65% of it since the beginning of this year," when she went back to working a straight full-time job on top of operating her porn sites.

Tasty Trixie (on CamModels.com) got her start with camming in 2000 before going onto starting her first porn site.  She observed that camming might be good because rather than in spite of the economy.  "During a recession or when news in the world is bad, people crave a personal, service-oriented touch to everything, especially something as intimate as sexual pleasure. We saw that with 9/11 - there was never a better time to cam that whole year than in the aftermath of of the towers falling."

Delia DeLions (on CamModels.com) has been in the industry since the early 2000s with her partner Trixie.  "It has been really nice to have the extra income coming in at a time when things have been pretty tight.  With the slumping revenue from our websites it does end up being a larger portion of our overall income."

Everyone was in solid agreement on the growing importance of interactivity with online erotic entertainment.  As Delia said, "With the massive amounts of free porn that are out there on illegal tube sites, bit torrents, forums, etc., I think the value of live entertainment with potential for interaction like cam shows does increase."  Trixie noted, "Once you've established your customer account on a camsite, paying for shows becomes far less intrusive than having to put on a condom for meatworld sex.  You don't even feel or see the money coming out of your pocket; there's no physical exchange of money, you just grab your dick and start jerking."

Trixie suggests an important angle I hadn't thought of: "There might also be less competition from camgirls who aren't serious about making money because of the visibility of naughty-cams all over; it might be more obvious to them that you aren't going to be able to retain any privacy or keep your webwhoring a secret...  In the old days of camming there was more of an illusion of safety/freedom from discovery - maybe people don't have that anymore."  (Although, Audrey suspects the opposite.  "The sites are definitely more competitive these days... and more camgirls than ever, possibly a result of more unemployment overall.")

Keep in mind, the people I spoke with have experience in amateur, niche, fetish, and independent porn, so if they are finding that customers are in search of more personal connections, I can't imagine how the mainstream cookie-cutter porn industry must be feeling.

I understand the strong appeal of interactive entertainment, but I've wondered why clients pick cam shows over other forms of erotic fun.  If you're looking for conversation and personal interaction, why spend $200-400 for an hour for private cam shows when you can find a dominatrix or escort to see you in the flesh?  For my tastes and comfort level, if I had $20 to spend, I'd buy porn, and if I had hundreds to spend, I'd buy an in-person session with a sex worker.  Maybe for most of our cam show customers, though, the first option is too impersonal, and the latter is too personal -  potentially crossing some kind of arbitrary line into "seediness" or "cheating".  I suspect that camming is the ideal neutral zone for clients not yet ready (or who will never be ready) to take the plunge and see sex workers in person, but who still crave individualized experiences.

So, what should small-time pornographers like me do?  What are the pros and cons that I'm looking at right now?  It comes down to both money and my personal satisfaction.

Porn has become an unreliable source of full-time income for me, even though it's still great to have that recurring revenue stream, however much it dwindles.  I'm not going to close my sites and declare failure or anything, but I need to seriously think about how my time and energies are best spent, and make decisive cutbacks to the porn site part of my work.  (I can't help but notice the perfect harmony in the fact that my time spent porning versus camming is now about 1:4 on the profit-per-hour-spent-working ratio, and 1:4 weeks of the month I'm bleeding and can't be on cam anyway.)

Despite its mishmash of incongruous 1997/2010-looking interfaces, animated sparkling GIFs, and truly embrassing insistence on always referring to us chat hosts as "stars" ("I am a star!  A big bright shining star!"), iFriends has never been late paying me.  CCBill, the renowned "most stable" porn site billing processor, has flat-out not sent my checks three times this year.  They claim these checks must have gotten lost in the mail, but in this economy, I'm simply not swallowing it.  CCBill has paid like clockwork for years and never once has a check ever been "lost in the mail" before, nor am I missing any other pieces of mail from other senders.  (And, of course, when these checks mysteriously go "missing in the mail", I have to pay  a $30 fee to re-issue the "lost" check.)

There's also the issue of my enjoyment with what I'm doing.  The vast majority of the work associated with running porn sites is boring.  95% of the job is staring at a computer, not all that different on the surface from what the rest of my white collar friends do.  I love that other 5%, though.  I love the creative process, even if I'm not the most creative person in the world.  I love still photography, and challenging myself to get better at shooting other people as well as myself.

But, I also love interaction with clients on cam - especially submissives and the ones with interesting kinks.  I love getting into a good session with someone who clicks with me, I love the immediate feedback, I love the variety of human sexuality, I love how glowingly happy people often look (when they have their own cam I can watch) when they have a great experience with me.  At the end of 8 hours of camming, I tend to come away feeling more accomplished than I do after 8 hours of resizing photos or trying to explain to technophobic site members to how watch my videos on their WebTV.  (Of course, the price I pay for the ease of camming is giving 50% of my income to iFriends.  In comparison, with my adult sites, between credit card processing, hosting, and affiliates, I'm losing at least 25%, maybe as much as 35%, of my sales price.)

I don't have any grand solutions or "take home point", I'm mostly scheming out loud and hoping to see what other people have to say on the subject.  I like being a pornographer and I like being a cam whore - they each have their ups and downs.  I'm working on finding my own balance in the current financial climate.

In the comments, I'd love to hear from other sex workers who do camming and porn.  I'd also love to see more sex workers in any sector writing on their own blogs about how the recession has changed their business so we can have a conversation about how we're adapting to the economy.  It feels like the elephant in the room, and I'd love to see if we can all help each other by sharing ideas and experiences.  (Let me know if this prompts you to write something, I'll link to it from here.)

"The membership restrictions of [The Foundation for Personality Expression], and the form and the content of its meetings, demonstrate a familiar pattern in minority identity politics in US history- it is often the most privileged elements of a population affected by a particular civil injustice or social oppression who have the opportunity to organize first.  In organizing around the one thing that interferes with or complicates their privilege, their organizations tend to reproduce that very privilege."

-- Susan Stryker, in her book, Transgender History.

I thought it was interesting to see a historian observe this about the trans rights movement - since similar criticism has also been pointed at white middle class sex workers.