When I was 13 or 14, I saw a movie called Foxfire, and a certain scene in it really affected me.  The movie was released in that general time where the mainstream entertainment world was trying to figure out how to appropriate and capitalize on riotgrrl culture and create a more sales-friendly "girl power" fad.  (I've since read the novel by Joyce Carol Oates two or three times, and I much prefer the storyline in its original setting of a working class groups of girls in the 1950s.)

Aside from Foxfire being a fond relic from that period when Angelina Jolie was all tomboy-sexy - as well as featuring other androgynous hottie Jenny Shimizu - the movie taught me a valuable lesson by shoving in my face the concept that you share responsibility for wrongdoings when you fail to prevent them.  I don't mean to overly fangirl a Hollywood movie, but Foxfire was my first introduction to the concept of what solidarity means, even before I was aware of the word.

This scene is at near the beginning of the movie, setting up how the characters meet and bond.  The context: Rita, the redhead, is tearfully telling new-girl Angelina Jolie's character about a teacher who's been harassing and touching her when her keeps her in detention.  The cheerleaders in the bathroom laugh and dismiss the whole thing, and Angelina sets everyone straight.

Afterwards, the group confronts and attacks the teacher, and the previously shy and ashamed Rita slams his head into a table and tells him she'll cut off his balls if he ever touches her again.

This really got me thinking about oppressive types of people.  It's important to remember, even if they're not immediately targeting you just now, they sure as hell would if they could.

This post is a part of the Scarleteen Sex Ed Blog Carnival.  Find links to posts from other participants here.  This is veering off the course in which other participants have been headed, since I don't want to write about why sexual education is a good thing, or hit with you my own sales pitch for why Scarleteen and why you should donate, so I've written about a sexual health issue near and dear to me.

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If you have a uterus and fallopian tubes, you've been hearing the same thing since you were in junior high (or earlier).  When it comes to birth control, your options are condoms, the pill, or maybe, if you're feeling unconventional, the shot or the IUD.  But what about those of us who don't want to take hormones or have an IUD painfully jammed up our cervixes?  I got myself fixed four years ago - via tubal ligation - and I couldn't be happier with it.

First, a note on gender and language: for the sake of brevity and smoother writing, I'm going to refer to those who have a uterus and fallopian tubes as "women", but this doesn't mean that I don't consider trans women to be women, nor do I mean to exclude those who do not identify as women, but who may want a tubal ligation.  Birth control isn't only an issue for straight people.  Aside from all the bisexuals, consider, for example, a gay-identified, uterus-having FTM trans guy who fucks men, or a cisgender woman who has an non-op/pre-op MTF trans woman as her partner.  It's just too hard to write inclusively of every possibility and still have concise, readable sentences.

I have never wanted children.  I do not like children.  Where most women light up with delirious joy when they see babies and little kids, I'm just hoping the child doesn't vomit or blow its nose on me.  I choose to focus my maternal energies on my cat-baby and on my various projects.

Our culture demonizes childfree women as profoundly selfish, cold, and unfeminine.  Sterilization for women seems to be more controversial and patently offensive than abortion - I'm not just saying "not right now" to the prospect being a mommy, I'm saying, "absolutely fucking never."  I'd guess there are more places in America that will perform abortions than will sterilize childfree women.

Try on these common responses for starters:

"Aww, you'll change your mind when you hit 30!  Wait until that biological clock of yours starts a-ticking!"

"Sure, you think don't like kids now, but it's totally different when they're your own!"

"Your life as a woman just won't be complete without experiencing pregnancy and birth!"

"Smart and pretty people need to out-breed those ignorant hicks!"

And so on.  All of the sentiments assume, whether overtly or just subtly, that the only reason for me (and by extension, other women) to exist is to pop out babies, that it's where I'll find my "real" happiness in life, and that I'm controlled by a biological clock, incapable of making rational decisions about my fertility.

I've dated a couple of guys who wanted vasectomies.  I went to their mandatory counseling sessions with both of them.  It was easy as pie!  No condescending insults, no pervasive culture of, "Come on, now, all men want to have babies!  You'll probably change your mind anyway, you silly creature!"  They were dudes, and it's natural for dudes to not want to have kids.  No one shames or questions the sanity of men who get sterilized.

I got to watch one of my boys have his vasectomy performed, which was awesome, and took less time than getting a pedicure.  Had I been supplied with a syringe of lidocaine and an autoclave, I could have performed his vasectomy on my kitchen counter using cuticle scissors, a crochet hook, and a soldering iron.  He didn't even need stitches afterwards, and while he spent a few days taking it easy, he didn't need much pain medication at all.  Vasectomy was easy to obtain for him, cheap, and didn't have many risks or a long recovery time.

When I was 22, I decided it was time to get serious about finding a doctor to sterilize me.  If you're looking to get a tubal ligation, I highly recommend doing what I did: get a list of doctors from Planned Parenthood that they refer women to for tubal ligations.  Here in Seattle, I think it was over a dozen doctors.  I called one.  I told the receptionist that I'd like to make an appointment to talk about getting a tubal ligation, but that I wanted to make sure before I even bothered to come in that the doctor didn't have a problem sterilizing young childfree women.  The receptionist put me on hold, then told me it shouldn't be an issue.  My consultation went much better than I expected.  I came in there armed to the teeth to argue about my right to be sterilized, but the doctor was already on board.  He just gave me a short spiel about how tubal ligations are to be considered permanent.  To cap it off, he even ranted briefly about how rude and paternalistic it is that other doctors won't sterilize women who want it.  I was in!

My experience in finding a great doctor on the first try seems to be pretty unique, however.  Talking with other women, or looking at forums dedicated to birth control, you'll see tale after tale of women frustrated at being denied the right to control their own fertility, belittled by doctors and told that no, they actually will want to have children.  I am so glad I didn't have to go through that.

I was scheduled to have a laparoscopic tubal ligation, which means I'd just have one tiny little scar.  I decided that I didn't want a sterilization via Essure or the other new methods of inserting things into your fallopian tubes by forcing things up my cervix and (hopefully) correctly into my tubes.  Firstly, because the multiple procedures involved in these methods sounded more painful and stressful than tubal surgery, and secondly, because my doctor has been doing tubal ligations for 30 years and not once had any failures that he was aware of.  I didn't want to be awake and having someone jab away at my internal organs, I wanted to be knocked out and wake up in recovery when the jabbing was completed.

When my special day in the hospital came, it was a serious, all-day event, not like the "pedicure" my ex had gotten.  I switched into a gown, and got an IV line started to give me a saline drip and antibiotics.  It was done in a real operating suite, with my doctor, an anesthesiologist, and other helpers there to attend to me.  I would have to spend most of the day in recovery in the hospital.  (All this means that a tubal ligation costs loads more than a vasectomy.  My tubal was 10-20 times as expensive as your average vasectomy.)  The method of sterilization my doctor used was placing silicone rubber bands around my doubled-over fallopian tubes, which apparently has a shorter recovery time, and doesn't carry the risk to other internal organs that a slip during a cut-and-cauterization procedure could.  Here are my before-and-after shots, look for the white arrow pointing to the doubled-over sections of tube in the lower pictures:

There was a bit of bruising at the incision area, but after just two weeks, you had to look hard to see the small reddened scar that was barely snaking out of my belly button.  I will probably never have to worry about pregnancy again.  There is a slight risk that my body could "heal" itself, but sterilization beats out other birth control methods for efficacy.

I don't mean to sound like a hippie who's afraid of science, but I'm wary of the long-term effects of women taking birth control pills for 20+ years of their lives.  I've still used condoms for most of the sex I've had in the last 4 years, but I'm happy that my backup method is internal and intrinsic, not something external that I have to rely upon being granted access to.  No one can ever take away my right to keep being sterilized.  It's like a buy-versus-lease question, and I wanted to buy my freedom so no one would ever take it away from me.  Although I think it's highly unlikely the government would de-approve the birth control pill, IUDs, and Depo-Provera shots, I really value that I will never have to leave my fertility up to the whims of politicians and the laws of whatever country I might find myself in.  (And, you know, after the zombie apocalypse, how many years do you think the remaining stockpile of birth control pills will last?)

I frequently meet other women who either already have an active interest in getting sterilized, or dismissed the idea as just too difficult until they met me.  I wish that more people were aware of what tubal ligations involve, and that it's not actually impossible to get them, even if you're young, single, and childfree.  As more women are choosing to not have children, I wish the sterilization was as widely-promoted as other forms of birth control, rather than a method relegated to the end of the list, surrounded by extra caveats and dismissive language.  It's not for everyone (neither are IUDs, the shot, the patch, or the pill), but if you know that having biological children is not for you, don't be afraid to get out there and demand it.  You might get turned down by a doctor or few, but don't get discouraged.

If money is an issue for you, all states have federal funds allocated to providing birth control to those with low-income, free of charge.  In Washington state where I live, this Malthusian keep-the-poor-from-breeding-up-more-welfare-babies effort is called "Take Charge", and in Seattle, you need to earn less than (last time I checked) $1600 a month to qualify.  (The amount varies by area.)  Go to your local Planned Parenthood or other clinic, and ask about funding options if you're low-income.  Also, check with doctors about payment plans - that might be an option if you don't have insurance.

So, this is my own contribution to sex education today: telling you about my choice method of pregnancy prevention, and my hope that in time, sterilization for women will become more widely-accessible, and as stigma-free as it is for men.

A few resources:

* Planned Parenthood's info on sterilization for those with eggs and those with sperm
* The sterilizationqa LiveJournal Community  (Yeah, I know, shocker - people still use Livejournal)
* The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (I highly recommend the "Biology and Breeding" and "Science Fiction and Fantasy" sections)
* The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless (Awesome book)

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Scarleteen is an nonprofit, body-positive resource for young people who are looking for medically-accurate, non-judgmental sex ed.  Good projects like Scarleteen can't survive without funding, so consider making a donation.  I'm happy to say that my smut company is in the list of the top-tier (over $1000) donors to the site.

I realize that I'm a couple of weeks late to the fight in publishing this rant, but I was so angry when people first starting attacking Dan Savage's It Gets Better Project, I decided I needed to let this sit on the back burner for a bit.  Rather than being rendered irrelevant by the passage of time, I'd like to think it's the opposite.  Now that the feminist whine-o-sphere has moved on to bitching about other grievous injustices, the distance actually serves to show how little the haters accomplished, and how beautiful it has been to see It Gets Better grow and touch lives.

Allow me to start with a personal story.

I grew up in a part of the country that's - how do I put it delicately? - well-represented on PeopleOfWalmart.com.  My grandmother and J's grandmother were best friends, they lived on the same street in a middle class neighborhood.  J and I spent a bunch of time hanging out as kids.  He was a gentle, kind, effeminate boy, who always seemed somewhat lonely.  We drifted, as people do.  We went to different schools and spent less time hanging out at our grandmother's homes.  All I knew, beyond our childhood friendship, were the embarrassed whispers of family gossip that he was a homo and had "problems" dealing with it.

When J was 17, he put a gun in his mouth.

One of my only serious regrets in life is that I didn't make an effort to keep hanging out, keep making a point to see him, to hopefully maybe in the best of worlds to have changed the ways things turned out for him.

In 1999, my life was no picnic, but I knew it wasn't going to be like that forever.  My best friend at that point was the most gay-bashed kid in our school, who was repeatedly assaulted by bullies, including while teachers watched without intervening.  Dropping out and fleeing flyoverland was one of the best decisions I've ever made.  Even though I had a thick skin, I saw zero reason to purposefully keep subjecting myself to an environment where people hated me, called me a slut, and threw food at me.  I wish J has still been alive when I left, wish I could have brought him with me, I wish I could have shown him what I suspected all along - that there is a whole world outside of this shithole hometown of ours.

Even though I wasn't able to be there for J, I wish someone would have told him, "It gets better".  And with the rash of queer youth suicides in the media, Dan Savage decided to step up and do just that, for all the other kids just like my childhood friend who ended his own life.

There is not a person alive today with more drive and ability than Dan Savage to tell the world - through his column, blog, podcast, and television appearances - that it's okay to be queer, or kinky, or non-monogamous, and to embrace their sexuality.  Dan Savage a powerhouse of a sex-positivity activist, frequently maximizing his widely-syndicated sex advice column and popular podcast to drum up support for important issues.  I especially appreciate that he's consistently implored straight readers that they need to pay attention to anti-queer bigots and politicians, because those types aren't just after The Gays, they're out to take rights away from straight people, too.  So, with his ability to have an impact on public discourse, Dan launched the It Gets Better Project last month, based around a video channel on YouTube, for anyone to upload messages of love and support for isolated and struggling queer kids who may be thinking of taking their own lives.

The videos I have watched are so moving and inspiring, and positively radiate care and love.  Participants get choked up over telling the world about how they'd tried to kill themselves, how glad they are to be alive today, how they have amazing partners now, how they've come to meet so many other great queer people, and how important it is to just stick it out, because it gets better.  Internet celebrities like blogger Perez Hilton and porn star Buck Angel both tell viewers that they're welcome to email them and they'll gladly offer their personal support.  (It bears emphasizing: I didn't see a single person who was attacking the It Gets Better Project put themselves out there to offer their personal support to queer kids.)

I've only watched a dozen or so of the videos, but the ones I've seen are just so damned beautiful and filled with love for lonely and bullied queer kids.  I've cried watching some of the videos I've clicked on.  It's one of the best, most direct, and most effective activist projects I've seen in ages.

So, in harsh contrast to all that support and hope, I witnessed many people in the feminist whine-o-sphere predictably became enraged at the offensiveness of it all.  The nerve of that asshole Dan Savage!  Using his fame and popularity to reach out and try to prevent queer kids from killing themselves!

The two key arguments against It Gets Better seem to boil down to a) "privileged" bullied queer kids thinking of killing themselves don't matter anyway, and b) if an activist project doesn't instantly fix all problems for everyone, it is therefor a horrible idea and shouldn't be done at all.

Dan Savage has addressed critics by blogging,

To the angry folks: I admit that IGBP doesn't do the impossible.  It doesn't solve the problem of anti-gay bullying, everywhere, all at once, forever.  The point of the videos is to give despairing kids in impossible situations a little thing called hope.  The point is to let them know that things do get better.  For some people things get better once they get out of high school, for others things get better while they're still in high school.

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Nothing about letting kids know that it gets better excuses or precludes us from pressing for the Student Non-Discrimination Act, demanding anti-bullying programs, confronting the bigots who are making things worse, or supporting the Trevor Project.  But we're not going to get legislation passed this instant or get anti-bullying programs into schools in rural areas—particularly private Christian schools—before classes start tomorrow.  Doing all of that is going to take years of hard work and dedicated activism.  In the meantime, while we work on all of that, we can get these messages of hope in front of kids who are crisis right now.  And we must use the tools we have at our disposal right now—social media and YouTube and digital video—to get these messages of hope to kids who are suffering right now in schools without GSAs and kids who are trapped schools that will never have GSAs and kids whose parents who bully and reject them.

There's nothing about this project—nothing about participating in this project—that prevents people from doing more.  Indeed, I would hope that participating in this raises awareness and leaves people feeling obligated to do more.

When I saw people expending their energy attacking It Gets Better, the dynamic felt all too familiar.  Just another group of elite politically correct liberals who prefer to focus on honing and touting their perfect theories, rather than taking real tangible actions.

My childhood friend I mentioned earlier?  J was a white guy, middle class, able-bodied, and presumably cisgender.  In the eyes of the feminist whine-o-sphere, I guess it that this means his life wasn't worth saving, and he didn't deserve receiving a message of hope and support during the darkest days of his life.  After all, he was just some privileged gay kid, not a caricature of perfect oppressions, a lab-created layer cake to salivate over, like a transgender wheelchair-bound black queer kid who grew up in a slum in Rio.

J's suicide is a very personal reason I want to slap every insipid armchair pundit who devoted time to attacking Dan Savage and the It Gets Better Project.  These critics blithely dismissed the campaign because they viewed it as only reaching out to privileged queer kids, which tacitly argues that those kids don't really matter and don't really suffer. Activists in first world countries often forget - while ironically often accusing others of being "too privileged" - that there are actual lives involved in the issues they theorize and pontificate over.  Kids who get bullied to death and are physically attacked by tormentors are not abstract concepts to me, they're people I've known and cared for.  They're living, and dead, reminders of why I didn't need to read The God Delusion to form an analysis of how religion poisons everything.

Growing up as a picked on queer kid isn't easy for anyone, even if they are non-poor caucasian able-bodied cisgender boys.  If life is so gleefully "privileged" for them, why do these queer kids kill themselves?  What if my friend J had been deaf?  What if he was Hispanic?  Would his life have been worth caring about then?  What does it take to get some simple fucking human decency towards the misery of people like J, or my other "privileged" friend who dealt with assault at school on a regular basis?  When you dismiss reaching out to "privileged" kids (and I dispute the accuracy of that allegation anyway), you dismiss and belittle the pain of those kids, plain and simple.

Samuel Johnson famously quipped a delightful observation - that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.  I shall now famously quip that "activism" which centers on accusing others of being too privileged is the last refuge of the lazy.

You know what's not lazy?  The It Gets Better Project.  Go submit your own video message, support initiatives in your area that address bullying in schools or provide funding for queer youth services, and donate to organizations such as The Trevor Project or  The Ali Forney Center.

Stick it to the feminist whine-o-sphere: actually do something.

I was feeling angsty and sad one night over the weekend, ranting to New Boy about my issues with Old Boys.  Poor sweet New Boy, he listens so patiently, even though he's no doubt sick of hearing me bitch about this topic.

Like every other sex worker - whether they'll talk about it openly or not - some of the people I've dated/fucked have treated me un-awesomely, to one degree or another, due to my occupation.  Earlier this year, I was involved with two men who had argued that it could screw up their careers if it was found out that they were linked to the likes of me - as though I'm some kind of wanted Taliban operative who plays target practice with babies in my spare time.  I think both of these guys were just using the work excuse as a bullshit cover for not have to deal with the risk of personal embarrassment over sleeping with a girl who takes her clothes off for money.  (This sort of issue is not confined solely to sex workers; see Violet Blue blogging about her similar experiences as a sex writer here.)

I recently posted a half-serious ever-so-web-2.0 relationship/friendship definition on Twitter: "It only exists if it's on the internet and indexable."  This year, I've gotten increasingly stubborn about the idea that I am done hooking up with anyone who makes a show out of the importance keeping things off-the-grid.

Part of me wants to declare that we sex workers should all stand up for ourselves and our dignity and stage a big boycott of dating/fucking people for free who are too cowardly to associate with sex workers outside of the bedroom. But, I realize that's impractical for a lot of sex workers (such as the ones who are still in the closet themselves), and I'll probably break my boycott someday anyway, since I'm lousy at dogmatism.  But still - imagine if more sex workers did make that decision right now and stopped enabling people to reap the rewards of sleeping with sexually skilled partners, while refusing to "give back" by being our most intimate of allies.  A partner who exhibits behaviors to let you know they are ashamed of you is inflicting a form of emotional abuse, plain and simple.

I'm a fairly public person who lives on the internet and blogs and Twitter.  I am not saying I have no sense of privacy or discretion when it comes to my personal life and the wishes of my partners, but that's a whole different matter than being curtly confronted about how I am not allowed to tell people that we've slept together.

The guy I refer to as Mr Personal Assistant had his employee relate to me that "his career is just too important right now", and that "with the media all over him", he just couldn't be linked to a sex worker.  I wanted to scream at him - had he had the nerve to actually tell me this himself - "Who the hell do you think you are?  One article about you in Wired Magazine does not mean the media is 'all over you' like an insatiable swarm of tabloid paparazzi, eager to catch you in a headline-making sex scandal."  (For those of you know know who I'm talking about, you are no doubt laughing hysterically right now.)

While not a single photo ever existed of that asshole and I - whether on our iPhones or the cover of Us Weekly - it's a different story with the long-term ex.  He wasn't a legendary douchebag like the other guy, but his more subtle behaviors still chipped away at me.  We both love photography, and took plenty of photos of each other.  When we went on vacation, for example, there were many "us in front of this thing" touristy images, candid glimpses we'd catch of each other, or just photos of us making silly faces at each other when we were bored.  I knew, without needing reminding, that photos like these were not pieces of my life that I could upload to my Flickr account.

Being a sex worker has meant knowing exactly how many times I've appeared in publicly-viewable photos with a person I've dated/fucked. And that answer is often "zero".

With the long-term ex, the one with a camera ever-present around his neck, I know where all six of his photos of me are.  Two are at a conference, two are at a large party, and two are from our vacation.  All of these photos imply that I'm just some person who happened to be in the same place, perhaps a casual acquaintance, or the back of the head of a tourist who obtusely wandered into the frame of his perfect shot.  Never, ever, is there a photo of us together, and gods forbid, certainly not a photo that implies we were "involved".  If you're someone who knew us, and looked at his prolific photo-taking, I would think it actually stands out that he has oodles of photos of all of his friends, including other women he's been involved with, except for me.  That still stings.  (It reminds me of the scene in The Village where one character informs another that he knows a certain man is very attracted to her.  She asks him how he could be so certain of that.  The answer?  "Because he never touches you".)

This summer, I've been trying to up my game on my "scare 'em away plan" of sorting new potential mates.  This weekend, I disclosed to New Boy that I had been testing him a bit.  When we met, I liked him right away, so I immediately set about trying to seduce him - and, of course, see if he was going to be scared away.

On the first night we were getting to know each other, a friend took a photo of us together at a club, which I found in her Flickr stream.  Throughout the coming weeks, I kept at it.  I not only stood next to him in photos, I put my arm around him!  I exhibited body language that suggested sexual attraction!  And, New Boy passed this simple-but-vital test of mine with flying colors.  He uploaded these photos alongside all his other photos, like there was something totally unremarkable and non-shameful that his friends, family, and coworkers would be able to see us together.  This sounds trivial to civilians, but after my last year of problematic mating, it makes me feel stupidly warm and fuzzy.  No one knows if or where things will progress with New Boy, but he's certainly set the bar high for everyone who comes next, just by being sane and normal towards me, rather than acting like he's an evangelical preacher cheating on his wife and I'm an underage gay hustler.

After the end of the conversation wherein I revealed my photo test to New Boy, I was curling up in bed, and texted him my closing thoughts for the night: "Thank you for treating me the way I think I deserve to be treated."

And thanks to all the other slut-lovers and ho-lovers out there for simply acting like we are regular human beings, not plague-infected, career-ruining embarrassments.  You all rule.

[Edited to add: I worry this post comes across like I'm throwing a major pity party for myself and that my love life is completely shitty.  It's not at all, and I also recognize that I have had much, much better luck with the dating scene than many other sex workers.  It's just that this last year contained some notable unpleasantness in my personal life for me, and two guys who represent different ends of the spectrum of how partners of sex workers can react poorly to our work.  One, overtly, one, more subtly.  While I still really want to punch Mr Personal Assistant in the face, I only harbor minor resentment towards my longer-term ex, who was, in most ways, a really awesome partner.]