I've been thinking a lot in the last month about sex worker activism/outreach and what people in North America have been trying thus far.  One of the tactics that's popularly been deployed - and which is our primary form of "outreach" - is storytelling.  There are oodles of published sex worker memoirs, sex worker blogs, Twitter feeds, and live storytelling events have been organized in Manhattan such as The Red Umbrella Diaries.  The mainstream media also loves getting sex workers to dish on their "secret lives," and it's generally the only time they care to talk to us.  This blog post isn't about any one person or blog or book or event, it's about the idea as a whole.

I love sex worker tales.  I've read a number of the memoirs, dozens of sex worker's blogs, and attended a couple of the Manhattan readings, and have watched all the videos and podcasts made from those events where stories were recorded.  But, I think I look at these stories through a different lens than most people, because I'm also a sex worker.

The thing is, I wonder what this "shop talk" looks like to regular people.  I don't know if storytelling is helping us advance our cause.  But is that its goal anyway?  Is it subversive activism - luring people in with titillating tales of jizz-eaters and anal fisting, and in the process, making ourselves seem human and real and worthy of rights?  Or is it just another means by which the public is invited to come and laugh at the freaks, and the joke's actually on us?

There are two types of sex worker stories.

My favorite sort are the ones of self-discovery and observations about life, whether these tales are funny, awkward, depressing, painful, or transcendent.  I like seeing how sex - paid, unpaid, all its forms - affects people.  I zero in on that sort of thing and find it really interesting.  I could never get tired of seeing these sorts of pieces in any form, and I think these sorts of things do help us humanize, explain, and publicly explore our choices.

The other type of sex worker story that gets told, however, is the one called, "Ewww, clients are ugly and disgusting and have fetishes, let's make fun of them!"  I don't expect sex workers to find every one of their clients sensual, handsome, and witty, but I don't understand what we have to gain by telling the public all the time that the sorts of people who patronize us are scummy losers and that "we" laugh at them.

I feel bad sometimes that I'll rant on Twitter about a mean dude angrily trying to heckle me into fingering my ass for him, but usually neglect to mention someone cool that I meet on a given night of live web cam work.  My fans and clients whom I enjoy or feel neutral towards vastly outnumber the obnoxious losers.  I don't like dealing with assholes and cheapskates and intrusive people, and I do sometimes publicly complain about them, but I'm not going to run to the internet to dish on clients whose only "transgression" is being socially inept, having an "odd" fetish, or not meeting my own personal standards of attractiveness.

Sex workers who are feminists, politically correct, or otherwise "sex-positive" often don't hesitate to publicly mock (male) clients for being fat, hairy, and kinky.  After all, if it's a paying (male) customer who's fat/hairy/kinky, they're a freak to be laughed at, even by sex workers who are one or more of those things themselves.  I just don't understand how we're changing the public perception of the sex industry by offering, "Come be entertained by us as we amuse you with tales of our patrons' contemptibility."  That sort of thing feels so mean-spirited when done on a public level.  Why do you think so many people come to sex workers in the first place, if not to explore kinks?  I think it's neat that I interact with plenty of men who tell me things they can't even tell their own wives, and even if it's not my personal fetish, I'd never write something about how silly or stupid they are for liking that kink.  Maybe it's because I'm kinky myself.

Healthcare workers deal with all sorts of things with patients and the human body that can be gross or funny.  I used to sleep with a guy who relayed the weird stuff people jammed up their asses before freaking out and coming into the ER, people prepared with rehearsed stories about how they accidentally "slipped" and "fell" on a cumbersome household object.  But, these stories would have never been posted on his hospital's website.  When you have a job that deals with "the weird" in any way, workers find ways to laugh about it as a coping mechanism, to their friends and amongst other workers, and even develop gallows humor about the roughest stuff.  But, you don't see a flurry of nurses writing books about how disgusting their patients are, or doctors organizing public events that involve making fun of people for coming to them with an embarrassing medical problem.

There's also the whole issue of creating a culture where sex workers are indeed being heard more, but perhaps only for the petty amusement factor.  Civilian folk lap up tales of "the freaks," but does that help the sex workers rights movement?  Is that an effective gateway into actually engaging people in our real politics and issues?  The dynamic feels exploitative to me, in two ways: it exploits clients as a group - people who were tacitly or explicitly paying for confidentiality and someone who understands (or who can fake understanding), and it exploits sex workers by positioning their primary value to society as entertaining the squares with crazy stories.

Let's not do that thing where people kick the person lower on the ladder than they are so as to look superior.  "I might be a sex worker, but at least I'm not the guy paying someone to spank him and tell him he has a small penis."  That's bully behavior.  Maybe I'm taking it all too seriously, and yes, I realize that it's fun to share stories and blow off some steam amongst ourselves, but as I sit here analyzing the world of sex worker representation in America, I don't know if this focus on belittling customers is helping us at all.

Takeaway question: can we humanize ourselves without dehumanizing clients?

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I'm going to be starting a new sex workers rights project.  The name I've chosen for it is SWAAY, which stands for Sex Work Activists, Allies, and You.  Of all the names I considered, I picked this one because it best explains what I want to do in two ways: outreach for normalizing sex worker politics into people outside the ho bubble, and SWAAY also works as a descriptive for what the aim is - swaying public perceptions.  (My original idea of "SWAY" was cock-blocked because sway.org was already taken, so I'm just adding an extra "a" and going with SWAAY/swaay.org.)

The aim of the project is accessible outreach to American audiences.  As it says on the "coming soon" page on swaay.org, the tagline is,

Advocating for understanding, respect, and change by connecting the public with the people and facts behind sex work

I truly believe that the most important thing that the sex workers rights movement in the US fails to do is to real public outreach.  Before we can get to changing laws and decriminalize all of our professions, we need to start with simply humanizing ourselves and giving regular people the basic tools for understanding our issues.  Most people don't even know the term "sex worker," and many who do think that's just the PC way to say "hooker."  My goal with SWAAY is to create digestible, informative outreach for people with little or no previous experience in radical sexuality, labor, immigration, gender, or feminist issues.  (And, just to be extra ambitious, the accent colors I've chosen are grey and teal with pink highlights.  At last!  A sex worker web site that's not done in pink and red!)

Since I work full time, and also try to have a private life and eat and sleep, I can't just crank this out in a couple of weeks.  I don't want to crank it out in a couple of weeks, since it is very important to me, and I'm spending plenty of time just pondering how to structure things and how to set the tone.  I'm shooting for May 1st, but don't say that I promised, because I could well run out of time between now and then and delay the launch.  (This is why there's an activist class and a "working" class with sex work - lots of people are occupied with being full-time sex workers so we don't have tons of leftover energy for saving the world.)

Many of you have asked me how you could get involved.  Thank you!  The "disclaimer":

While I am not interested in forming a collective, I will need some wonderful collaborators and help with SWAAY, mostly from sex workers.  Frankly, I want to establish right now that SWAAY is a benevolent dictatorship - if you don't have a very similar vision to mine, I wish you the best of luck starting your own project instead.  The whole point of me starting SWAAY this way is so I don't have to get bogged down in process, meetings, infighting, and consensus.  I want to work with people who are responsible, knowledgeable, and also don't want to waste time bullshitting around with "being a part of a group."

A vast amount of effort gets wasted within many political groups because people can't even agree on the most basic stuff like the group's goals and strategy, and participants lack the common sense to just form multiple projects that better suit their needs.  It's one thing to be able to network with people who are different from you and come together on larger campaigns and coalitions, but it's another to try and constantly force square pegs into round holes - at the expense of anyone actually getting useful things accomplished.  In my experience, too much of any group's energy gets spent on squabbling over who's in charge - whether that squabbling takes the form of deciding who's on the board/steering committee in a democratic group, or the majority regularly trying to appease the sole irritating obstructionist (and power-wielder) in a consensus-based group.  I truly feel like having one person who is definitely the one delegating and making final calls is the most pragmatic way to operate most group projects.  (And I say that not as someone who's only happy if I'm the person in charge, but also totally happy if I understand what task I am supposed to be doing that has been assigned to me.  I just don't want to waste energy fighting about it.)  This is just how I roll with my loathing of group dynamics, so take it or leave it.

I have some stuff I'll post about needing help with in the near future, but for now, there are two main things I need, which are open to everyone, sex worker or not.

I need money!

Yes, yes, everyone needs money.  And I know it's a recession.  I need about $1400 right now to get things rolling in the right direction.  That money will go towards printing pro- sex worker stickers and shirts to serve as campaign materials/fundraising items to get the project self-sustaining.  I'd rather not have to pay for everything myself, since I'm already investing a lot of time in this.

If you'd like to contribute, you can do so via Paypal on swaay.org.

SWAAY will not be a tax-deductible 501c(3) organization, since that's a ton of work, requires a number of people to make their personal information public and sit on a board, and there's not going to be so much money flowing through it that it will matter to most donors.  Hassle, privacy, and ROI fail.

I also need survey participants: sex workers, already-interested allies, and complete outsiders.

As I decide how to structure the educational web site and put a lot of thought into what most needs to be conveyed (and how), I need to do some market research.  I'm looking for people who can give me 15-20 minutes of their time during the month of February.  Could this be you?  Awesome!  I would like this group to mostly be Americans, but you don't have to be.  [UPDATE: SURVEY CLOSED, THANK YOU!]

(A sampling of images of covered women in the midst of Egypt's revolution during the last week.  More photos of women in this gallery and this one and here, too - not all of whom are Muslims or wearing headscarfs, niqabs, or chadors.  There's also an album for Facebook users, requires login.)

Before reading my post, you should know a bit about the situation on Egypt.  If you have not been closely following international news, I made a comic/infographic explaining the January 25h revolution through Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, so at the very least, go read that for the basic context.  If you want more information, here are three short videos that I liked, with totally different tones - the first has upbeat scenes from Egypt and Tunisia (which ousted their dictator recently), the second is a heartwarming look at Egyptians taking care of each other and the city of Cairo, and the third is a serious vlog made by a brave young woman who helped start this revolution.  For stuff specifically about women taking part in the Egyptian revolution, see pieces from Slate, Matt Cornell, Newsweek, Global Voices, Democracy Now, and The New York Times.  Lastly, you can watch ongoing events on Al Jazeera English's web stream - this is still unfolding!

I made my most controversial and widely re-posted tweet on Twitter a week ago.  Here's a sentence that proved even more polarizing than I expected:

I hope that western feminists who infantilize Muslim women see photos of Egyptian women in burqas rioting against a dictatorship.

Aside from some angry stupids, my statement received good responses from both cool Western folks and residents of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.  (As an aside, for those calling me out for using the term "burqa" when the photos from Egypt show women wearing scarves and chador/niqabs/hijabs: yes, I knew that.  Accessible language is important to me, and everyone American has an idea of what "burqa" means.  And, Twitter only allows for so many characters.)

For most people, the idea of a sex worker supporting covered Muslim women sounds absurd.  What could we possibly have in common?

I do feel a sense of solidarity with Muslim women who are belittled for choosing to wear an abaya, chador, niqab, burqa, or what-have-you.  As a sex worker and a devout atheist, I am hardly what you could consider an apologist for the injustices women suffer in the MENA region and how Islam views women/sexuality in general.  But, that doesn't mean Muslim women are feeble-minded weaklings.  I know what it feels like to have other women decide that you're too stupid to be allowed to make your own decisions.  Western feminists, by and large, claim that I have been brainwashed by the patriarchy, and must be "saved" from my decision to work in porn.  Likewise, the same people tend to impose their judgments on Muslim women, arguing that they need to be "saved" from the religious brainwashing forcing them to adhere to Islam.

It's easy to feel paternalistic towards Muslim women - the more covered, the more pitied - and they are definitely a caricature in the West for what "oppressed" and "sexism" looks like - just like sex workers.  The same people who say it's hypocritical for covered Muslim women to demand freedom in Egypt will also scoff at sex workers demanding respect in the states.

One of the things I often remind people is to remain conscious of is whether their desire to "help" others is rooted more in solidarity, or in paternalism.  It's a troubling dynamic to me, and not only because I'm in a group of people greatly affected by it.  It's a very slippery slope to start deciding that other adults are incapable of deciding what they want to do with their lives.  Would you have any interest in building bridges with someone who condescendingly believes you can't be trusted to decide what to do with your life and what clothing (not lack thereof) to wear?

When dealing with social issues like Egypt's revolution, you have to look at things first not through the lens of feminist gender analysis, you have to get basic and consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  (For those unfamiliar, it's a pyramid setting up human needs, starting from food/water/shelter, and being topped out with self-actualization.)  Think of it also as a "social change hierarchy of needs": you can't lecture people about how they should focus on pondering whether wearing head coverings are sexist, when paying for food is a daily struggle for them.  This might come as a surprise to some, but when people don't have money for bare necessities, live in daily fear of the police, and have no hope for their futures, they're not laying in wait for middle and upper-class liberals in America try and dictate a political agenda to them.  I would love to see full gender equality in the MENA region, but I'm sick of seeing people doing the "let them eat cake" thing in regards to Egypt.

The situation in Egypt is exciting to me not only because the revolutionary spirit started in Tunisia is spreading, but because so many of the protesters seem to be young and less conservative than previous generations.  This gives me hope that this is a win for women - both in the long and short term.  American conservatives are busy fear-mongering about radical Islam, arguing hyperbolic nonsense that if Egypt's president leaves, sharia law will be instituted and women will be beheaded in the streets of Cairo.  After seeing so many women boldly rising up, screaming at male police, demanding the present leave, organizing a revolution, and getting involved in changing their country at the grassroots level, I don't think the women of Egypt would stand for it.  We Enlightened Western Liberals don't need to save them.  They're saving themselves.

(I don't want the comments on this post to turn into a debate abut Islam or religion in general, so save it for one of my posts that specifically address religion and sexuality, okay?  PS: Tracy Quan has also written about covered Muslim women.  See her 2006 piece here.)