As a teenager, I had a conversation with an older activist who had been arrested many times over the years.  He told me his secret to staving off despair and stress during the whole process.  He said something like, "When you're in jail, and the police strip search you, their goal is to humiliate you into obedience, so it's your job to turn the tables on them.  I do a sexy striptease, spin around like a fucking ballerina, and tell them how hot the whole thing makes me.  It takes away their power and makes them the uncomfortable ones."

These are the sorts of useful lessons I learned instead of going to high school.

"Sticking it to the man" can be about learning to draw power directly from disempowering constructs themselves.  On my way to my vacation, I knew wanted to do something to express my disapproval of the TSA's cancer-machines-versus-groping "choice".  (Also see National Opt Out Day set for November 24.)  If there is but one superpower that I possess, it's making people feel uncomfortable through my propensity for public displays of sluttiness and general unselfconscious loud-mouthery.

Image from the @TSAagent Twitter account

Disclaimer 1: I realize that whining about flight screenings is a problem that affects mostly people on the top of the world's privilege heap, and that this conversation has been dominated by middle/upper class white men.  Let's be real: the public outcry over this is because it's about crotches and nudity.  No one cares if their phone calls are being recorded or if the government detains people for years without trails, they just know they don't want another dude touching their junk.  I'm hoping that people will use this particularly titillating aspect of increasing government intrusion into our lives as a springboard to thinking about other civil liberties issues.  (I'm actually far more bothered by how critics of surveillance like Jake and Moxie have been harassed and detained by the government lately at airports after international trips.)  Overall, though, I think it's a positive thing any time that so many people - across party-lines - are freaking out and insisting upon their right to privacy.  As a country, we can't agree whether it's our right to own firearms and/or get abortions, but we can all agree we don't want government agents touching our bathing suit areas.

Disclaimer 2: some children and adults have been genuinely traumatized or upset by their experiences with the TSA.  I wasn't trying to belittle their pain and frustration at all, but to use my own body as a medium to protest against invasive security measures, and in a humorous way that upends the expected dynamic.

The TSA wanted to feel me up or see what I look like without clothes.  I get it.  I'm a sex worker.  My main porn site gets about 3 million unique visitors a year, and clients pay $4 a minute to see me naked on my web cam, so the TSA's interest in me came as no surprise.  Normally, I would charge for such a service, but this one was on the house.  Duty, country, sacrifice, patriotism, all that.

For my voyage, I donned a see-though chemise and sheer panties under normal clothes.  My nipples, crack, and pubes are all plainly visible though this ensemble.  The TSA needed to make sure that I wasn't concealing any errant Al Qaeda operatives in the folds of my labia, after all.  I would have done this naked, but being arrested for public nudity doesn't really help to underscore my cause, and it would screw up my vacation and turn me into a sex offender, both of which would be a real bummer.  (I also considered going through while packing a huge strapon cock with my metal-free, airport-friendly Joque harness.)

The bummer is that the cancer machines at Seatac were busted for some reason, so they were just using metal detectors.  But, even though I didn't get to shoot video of myself being groped, hopefully this is still amusing.  (My plan was to loudly moan and fake an orgasm while being molested by the TSA.)

Here's my video from the airport, published from a net cafe at the airport.  The portion shot inside the security area is about 10 solid minutes, and only the first minute of that is actually amusing, then it just goes to a long stretch of the boring ceiling while I was detained and the TSA waited for a police officer to talk to me.  The cop was actually very polite to me, and seemed understanding, and just sorta vaguely let me know that maybe I shouldn't do that again, because children might see.  (I told him I already picked a security line without kids, which it true.)

I hate it when people demand that I put my pants back on!  (And, like I pointed out, we're not supposed to wear jackets through security.  The TSA agent ordered me to violate TSA rules!)  As far as I know, I am the current record holder for the nearest-to-naked a passenger has gotten at a TSA screening.  I look forward to having that title stripped from me.

You're welcome to re-post or embed my video elsewhere, but I'd appreciate a link back to this blog post and crediting Furry Girl/Feminisnt.com.  Apologies on the low quality - I used a small cheap digital camera to record this because I wasn't going to risk having an expensive one seized if the TSA got uppity.  I edited it on the fly with the camera's own basic editing program since I no longer travel internationally with my laptop.

The TSA allows "opting out" of the "naked" scanners if you submit to a groping that some people consider a form of sexual assault - or, at the very least, creepy and uncomfortable. The TSA's goal is to use the grope-down to frighten the public into submitting to a scan which scientists at UCSF consider a cancer risk.  Don't be scared like the TSA wants you to be.

Remember the children's tale of Brer Rabbit?  It's time to beg not to be thrown into the briar patch.  Put on your sexiest, filmsiest underthings, opt for a grope-down, have fun with it, treat it like a performance, and fake an orgasm in public next time you fly.  You'll gain self-confidence, amuse and inspire other passengers, draw attention to the sexually-invasive nature of the modern airport security process, and make government employees look more predatory and inappropriate while feeling up strangers.  Protesting in such a way won't change TSA regulations overnight, but it adds to the dissent and public conversation, flips around a demeaning dynamic, and for bold travelers, getting this transparent just might be the only way these days to enter an airport with a smile on your face and your dignity intact.

And hey, at least I'm not one of those public embarrassments who wear their pajamas, a blanket, and an inflatable neck pillow to the airport.  For fuck's sake, people!  Have some sense of propriety.

[For new readers: writing and doing projects like this doesn't make me any money, but you can always express your appreciation via my Amazon wishlist, or by donating money to my favorite nonprofit, the St James Infirmary.]

A week ago, a tragedy befell a popular dancer and altporn performer.  Joanna Angel and Jessie Lee were in a car accident on the way to an con called Exxxotica New Jersey, and Jessie Lee (aka OMGitsJessieLee) was seriously injured.  She's now awake and eating, but she's got a lot of work (and expenses) ahead of her.  I don't know Jessie, but I do know that for sex workers, an injury means not only medical bills, but also not being able to work and earn a living while recovering.

One thing I'm a big believer in is taking care of your own, and I'm happy to see how many other pervs and pornographers are working on fundraising for Jessie.  I'm also offering a freebie, and I hope that it will help sweeten the deal and encourage you to donate to Jessie's recovery.

FREE PORNO/STUFF FOR DONATIONS:

* Joanna Angel is offering lots of goodies.  For $50 and above, you get a free autographed copy of Burning Angel Magazine.  For $100 and above, you get the magazine, a month subscription to BurningAngel.com, and a DVD.  For $250 and above, you get all those things plus a blow-up sex doll of Joanna Angel.  To receive your thank you gifts, please send an email to helpjessielee AT burningangel.com with "PAYPAL DONATION" in the Subject Line. Include your PayPal Transaction ID # and the ADDRESS where you'd like the gifts mailed, and we'll confirm it's been done. Also, all proceeds from Jessie Lee's DVDs in the Burning Angel store will go to Jessie, just put "HELP JESSIE LEE!" in the comments section when checking out.

* Annaliese, owner of altporn site GodsGirls.com, is offering a free membership to the site for donations of $20 or more.  On her cam site, OnHerCam.com, Annaliese is offering to match donations made by members.  See her offers here.

* Jasper Trash is offering a free set of never-before-seen photos for donations $15 and above.  See info and previews here.

* Get a free 30-day membership to Cocksexual.com for you donation of $20 or more.  This offer is open until the end of the year.  Email your donation receipt to ilovethecock AT cocksexual.com with "JESSIE LEE" as the subject line, as well as your preferred username and password combination.

Please go to Jessie's official support site, www.helpomgitsjessielee.com, and send a donation.  Then email your Paypal donation receipt/confirmation to the various porn sites listed above, and get your kick-ass prizes.  Even if you don't care about giving money to someone you don't know, you're getting an excellent cut-rate deal on independent porn in exchange for your donation.

OTHER FUNDRAISING:

* Photographer Ellen Stagg is selling a lovely glossy 8x10 of Jessie for $25, all of which will be donated to Jessie.

* Since Jessie is apparently a vegetarian/vegan, I'll be donating 5% of membership sales from VegPorn.com until the end of the year.

* BombshellBrats.com is currently donation half of all sales to Jessie.

* GeekGirlsOnline.com is donating 15% of sales during the month of November.

* There will be a comedy night in NYC for Jessie on November 24th.  See event details and buy tickets here.

Check out these other lists of free stuff (which might be updated more often with things I've missed) by Missy Star, Driven By Boredom, and Jasper Trash.

As it says in the header of my blog, my political philosophy is informed primarily by Patrick Swayze's character in Roadhouse: "I want you to be nice until it's time to not be nice."

There are two types of "politically-engaged" people: those who are concerned with reality, and those who are concerned with theory, and rarely the twain shall meet.  There are those who work hard, with what they have, in the here and now, to make the world a slightly less shitty place.  Then there's the theory camp, which likes to hem and haw about "what ifs", focusing on keeping their educated analyses in a consistent and tidy spreadsheet.  They criticize and dismiss the works of the reality camp as not being perfect enough, while they themselves contribute nothing but armchair commentary about how things should be done.  I despise the theory class with every fiber of my being.  Always have, always will.

I've been sitting back and waiting to post about the final nails in the coffin of "Alexa di Carlo".  While I doubt the saga is complete, I've decided it's time to write something about the whole thing before the sex blogging community forgets and goes back to busying themselves with writing sex toy reviews.  Plenty of other people have written pieces rehashing what's happened, so check out these select bits of commentary by Expose A Bro (the kick-off post that details all the information of the outing), Charlie Glickman, Belle de Jour, The Sexademic, Miss Maggie Mayhem.

The dirty laundry in a nutshell: "Alexa" was the name of a fake escort who gave bad/dangerous sex advice on "her" blog, The Real Princess Diaries.  "Alexa" pretended to be an academic, stole photos from real sex workers and passed them off as herself, mocked and harassed sexuality activists, and was generally know for churning out poor-quality erotica about her adventures, which read like the cliche and misinformed fantasies of a man who wished he was a sexy woman.  "Alexa" also had another online persona, "Caitlain", that hit on underage teenagers, tried to get them to tell her in graphic detail about their sex lives, and even solicited and received nude photos from these minors.  But the infodump doesn't stop there - when "Alexa" was outed as being a frumpy dude in Delaware named Pat Bohannan, another secret scam was revealed his photo began to circulate.  "Alexa" was privately coaching newbie sex workers and other women to try out her favorite and most trusted client client, Pat Bohannan.  Collecting underage porn and convincing women to enter prostitution are both prosecutable crimes, and apparently, the guy has been reported to law enforcement.

As a community, many people came forward and offered their little puzzle pieces of information on the guy, and the picture formed was that of a devoted sexual predator - whose online web of deception and law-breaking was halted by the transparent collaboration of many sex bloggers, sex educators, sex workers, academics, and youth.  I can't think of a better example of what sex workers are always telling the world - it is those within sex worker communities who are in the best place to identify the truly dangerous criminals.

What I want to draw your attention to is not the "Alexa"/"Caitlain"/Pat clusterfuck itself, but the reactions to it, and how it reinforces all the things that I loathe about political discussions and how we react to anger, especially when it's coming from women.

As this all unraveled, the internet was quick to explode in commentary.  While many noted people wrote smart things about the messy, awful situation, every two-bit sex blogger from here to Kansas was also chomping at the bit to get their own post online to offer some contrarian counter-point in a desperate attempt to get traffic.  Many such commenters have been pushing a nonsensical slippery slope angle.  There's been a lot of babble about the horrors of "vigilant justice", and comparisons have been made to "witch hunts", "lynchings", and "unthinking angry mobs."

I'm an antiauthoritarian, and so as far as I'm concerned, "the justice system" and "the police" are simply vigilante justice implemented and accepted by majority rule.  I'll assign my opinion on acts of either "law enforcement" or "vigilantism" on a case-by-case basis.  "Vigilantism" is an accusation I've seen commonly used by a majority to dismiss efforts on behalf of the marginalized (or those who perceive themselves to be marginalized) to actualize their own immediate self-defense and self-offense, often after being failed by official systems.

Vigilantism (and by extension, all controversial methods of creating change or redressing grievances) is neither ethical nor unethical as a whole - is it a tactic, not a philosophy. For example, would I consider it an ethical response to break someone's legs for cutting in line at the grocery store?  Of course not, but that is not because I believe that violence is always wrong.  When a friend of mine once happened upon a gay-bashing and intervened by assaulting the attackers, I thought that was awesome.  This doesn't mean I think that breaking people's noses is always the best solution to every problem, but violent bigots are rarely compelled to stop through means other than a violent response.  Politically-engaged people seem to have the darnedest time wrestling with these issues of tactical dogmatism.

Outing and publicly shaming someone is a tactic, and one that I personally think was ethically correct in the "Alexa" situation, because it was a case of a persistent sexual predator who was causing harm to people - most obviously, the women he tricked into having sex with him, and teens who felt violated by sending him nude photos of themselves.  Various people have tried other methods of ridding the community of "Alexa"/"Caitlain" for years.  He was able to persist because of shame and silence, and his complete public outing shattered his power.  I remain in agreement with Dan Savage's take on similar matters.  To paraphrase: outings are brutal, and must be reserved only for brutes.

There's this idea floated by people are who not terribly mentally sophisticated that if the sexuality community supports a "vigilante" outing of this one man, no matter how vile or illegal they admit his behavior to be, then the community surely has opened itself up to being obligated to support all outings of all people in all instances.  This is the sort of junk you get from the theory class - they're too busy working on keeping their theories perfectly consistent.  They might as well be arguing, "I am against putting people in jail for murder, because once we start jailing anyone for anything, we will have to jail everybody."  There is no slippery slope.  It's lazy thinking, pure and simple, from people who don't care enough to determine ethics on an individualized basis, and prefer to make sweeping decrees without paying any attention to circumstance.  It's morality as an auto-reply form letter.

Throughout this latest (and hopefully final) bout of "Alexa"-induced drama, there's been a strong undercurrent of some people smugly clucking their tongues at women who are angry, dispassionately reminding us to not get bees in our dainty bonnets.  The nerve of us ill-mannered floozies for losing our cool!  How dare we act up in such a crude and extreme manner as to cuss and use all caps?

It's highly impolitic of women to ever be hateful, no matter if what we're screaming about is something as cut-and-dry as anger directed at a sexual predator.  Even when this attitude is coming from people who consider themselves progressives or radicals, it still feels like someone trying to drag women - kicking and screaming, of course - into a past where women were not allowed to be upset, and it was their job to keep up decorum and suffer injustices quietly.

I've long felt like the most uncouth person in the world, because I readily admit my capacity for great scorn.  I genuinely do hate oppressive people and groups, and unlike silly hippies, I absolutely do identify certain people and groups not as lost souls in need of saving, but distinctly as enemies.  I hate, and I love.  I smile at things like the creep behind "Alexa" losing his job, and I take care of my friends and my community with great affection.  I cheered aloud and clapped my hands when Andrea Dworkin died, and I feel real pain and sadness when I see people in my communities suffer tragedies.  I don't hide my so-called "ugly" feelings, I don't play Stepford Activist.  You might catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but when your underlying goal is to kill flies, why not just use a flyswatter and save your sweet stuff for those who deserve it?  I express anger on a regular basis, and as such, I'm violating an unspoken social rule of most progressive scenes: there's this idea that the first person to get angry loses the battle, as though ours is a race to see who can be nicest to predators, criminals, and abusers as they work to destroy us.  Anger, spite, hatred, and a desire for revenge are supposedly never an acceptable response to injustice - least of all, from women.

After the release of the Afghan War Logs, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange commented to the media, "I love crushing bastards."  I'm a WikiLeaks fan and supporter, and that line is one of my favorite things I've seen come out of Assange.  It's so perfect in its simplicity - taking satisfaction in exposing war crimes.  Later, at a more informal conversation with the British press, a journalist said something to him like, "A while ago, you made this tongue-in-cheek statement about how you love crushing bastards...", and Assange corrected him with his standard calm fierceness.  No, he wasn't joking.  He loved crushing bastards.

I wish more people stood up and admitted their love of crushing the bastards in their lives, and of the need for more bastards to be crushed.  You are not a monster because you hate bad people and bad social constructs.  I happen to think there's something dead inside you if nothing stirs hatred within you.  Hatred and anger are passions, like love and joy, and I've found that people either have deep passions or they don't, but no one is truly comprised of all hatred or all love.  Some of us are just more intense and open about all of our feelings.

I imagine that The Obtuseness Brigade will process this post as "Furry Girl says that violence and hatred are the only way to achieve social change, and that everyone should carry out acts of vigilante justice against anyone who annoys them."  Oh well.  Those types always need something to whine about.

Seeing as how quotes from movies starring Patrick Swayze are the final arbiters of all matters, I'll close with another - this time, Red Dawn.

"All that hate is gonna burn you up kid."
"It keeps me warm."

[Note: I will not be publishing any comments from people who want to debate or defend the actions of "Alexa"/Pat Bohannan.  That's not the point of this post, so you'll have to take it elsewhere.]

If I get presents sometimes, am I allowed to think of my blog as a paid gig yet?  A poorly paid gig - like begging for spare change - but hey, it's awesome to get things in my mail drop.  Thank you to the people who sent my latest cool new things: G, N, T, and A.  One of them came without a receipt/note, so I'm sorry for the person I'm missing.  (Feel free to utilize the "leave a gift message" option so you can tell me your email and I can thank you individually.)  The cool things I received:

* A mini cupcake pan by Calphalon.

* An animal cookie cutter set which includes a snail, hedgehog, moose, fox, bear, and a squirrel.  Snail cookies!

* Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá.

* Lonely Planet Australia.  (I was originally planning to go to Australia for this winter's vacation, but I'm going to Sri Lanka instead.  I will go to Australia next year, though.  I need my All Seven Continents merit badge.)

* Opening Up by Tristan Taormino

* Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein.  (The sender bought me two of these without instructions on what to do with the second copy.  I gave the extra to a trans friend of mine.)

My 27th birthday is coming up next month, and as always, I love gifts!  I have a wishlist on Amazon that's handy-dandy for browsing things I want, and they ship those items directly to me.  It's so easy to use, you really have no excuse for not buying me stuff.  My top two at the moment are the first couple of books listed in chronological order of being added, which are about Sri Lanka.