During the last week, I decided to spend a good chunk of time camming again.  It's something I don't do a lot, but figured I'd give it an honest go for a week and see how the market is doing right now.  I spent 28 hours working, and made more money than I expected.  I was, in fact, earning what I used to make on cam before the recession, which delighted me.

I enjoy interactive aspects of my work.  I like meeting people with strange fetishes, or who I find engaging in some way.  Getting paid to talk about things that interest me or turn me on is awesome.  I'm also a curious person by nature, and I like knowing intimate and "strange" secrets about people.  I like the trust of being informed about things a client hasn't told many other people, or maybe even no one.  It's that kind of intimacy many people can only share with strangers.  I take derive a sense of conspiratorial excitement in knowing things about a man that even his wife doesn't know, even though I wish people had kink-friendly relationships where they could freely share their fantasies with their partners.

Most people are polite, though that anonymity that brings stark honesty also brings about some inevitable rudeness and assholery.  Worse than that, however, are the viewers who don't give me any idea what they want me to do.  These are the guys who sit there quietly waiting for me to - I don't know - put on a Vegas-style stage show for them.  Or finger my ass.  Or recite the periodic table of the elements.  Or something.  These guys are the extreme version of the ones who merely type "do something sexy" or "do whatever you want."  Maybe I'm just a shitty entertainer, but I need something to work with.

I had a perfect example of this type tonight.  He paid $111 for a 37-minute cam show, which is much longer than these types usually stay.  (I keep half of that money, by the way - the cam network gets the other half.)  I don't know if he enjoyed himself.  I don't even know if he spoke English, although his IP address placed him on the east coast of the United States.  I spent most of the cam show fully clothed, smiling at the computer because I thought maybe not getting naked would force him to tell me to do something.  I'm not one of those sex workers who engages in client-bashing often, but I just have to share this example of what not to do if you're paying for a sex worker's time.

Keep in mind, this entire chat log represents 37 minutes of time, as shown by the time stamps:

[23:18] MRQUIETMAN Entered Room
FURRY-GIRL [23:18]: Hello there. How are you doing?
MRQUIETMAN [23:18]: h9
FURRY-GIRL [23:19]: So, what brought you to my chat room?
MRQUIETMAN [23:20]: cut
FURRY-GIRL [23:20]: I need a little bit of help from you so I know what you're into.  :)
FURRY-GIRL [23:21]: Can you tell me something that turns you on?
MRQUIETMAN [23:21]: age
FURRY-GIRL [23:21]: I'm 26. Or, is "age" your turn-on?
MRQUIETMAN [23:21]: usa
FURRY-GIRL [23:21]: I live in Seattle.
FURRY-GIRL [23:23]: I don't know if you're new to cam shows, but you need to give me some kind of hint about what you like, so we can go from there.
MRQUIETMAN [23:23]: ru pretty
FURRY-GIRL [23:23]: Yes, I think so.  :)
FURRY-GIRL [23:24]: What would you like to watch me do?  Or, what would you like to talk about?
FURRY-GIRL [23:26]: Don't be shy, I won't bite.
FURRY-GIRL [23:27]: Do you like hairy girls?
MRQUIETMAN [23:28]: me nietgher\
FURRY-GIRL [23:28]: What sorts of things turn you on? Name your pleasure.
FURRY-GIRL [23:30]: You're paying by the minute, and I'm happy to just sit here and smile, but is there anything you'd like me to do?
MRQUIETMAN [23:32]: hot
FURRY-GIRL [23:32]: Okay, I'll sit here in smile if that's what you'd like to see.
FURRY-GIRL [23:34]: Are you sure there's nothing I can do for you, or show you, or talk to you about?
MRQUIETMAN [23:34]: nice beeties
FURRY-GIRL [23:35]: Thank you. By chance, is English not your native language?  Habla Espanol?
MRQUIETMAN [23:36]: nowwwwwwwwww mew ur pussy
FURRY-GIRL [23:36]: Yes, that, I can do.
MRQUIETMAN [23:37]: nice
FURRY-GIRL [23:37]: Thank you.
MRQUIETMAN [23:39]: can talk
FURRY-GIRL [23:40]: I can't hear you speak aloud, if that's what you're asking. And I don't broadcast audio. We type things into the text box at the top of the chat window.
FURRY-GIRL [23:43]: Anything I can show you in particular?
MRQUIETMAN [23:45]: ur face
FURRY-GIRL [23:46]: Got any fantasies or dirty thoughts you want to chat about?
MRQUIETMAN [23:46]: ur sexy
FURRY-GIRL [23:46]: Thank you.
MRQUIETMAN [23:48]: yes
FURRY-GIRL [23:48]: Are you a boob man?
MRQUIETMAN [23:50]: and a coch nan
FURRY-GIRL [23:50]: "Coch"?  Cock, or cooch?
MRQUIETMAN [23:50]: cock
FURRY-GIRL [23:51]: What kinds of cock do you like?
[23:52] MRQUIETMAN Has left

I did eventually end up naked, but who knows if my client had a nice evening.  I wonder why he picked my chat room - was he a fan of hairy pussy, a fan of strapons, or simply a fan of clicking randomly on things on the internet until a naked girl appeared?

Sex work is filled with mysteries.

We're less than a month away from the 2010 Desiree Alliance conference, which takes place in Las Vegas from July 25th to 30th, so it's high time for me to tell you why you ought to be attending.  If you're a sex worker, curious about getting into sex work, or a genuine ally, it's the event of the year for you to learn new things and network with you kind.  I haven't been before, (the last one was in 2008), but it event seems to garner much praise all-around.

I've not attended many sex worker-specific events in the past, just the 2008 march in Washington DC and the 2009 Sex Worker Fest in San Francisco.  While I've been a sex worker for 8 years, I've mostly just lurked online and kept an eye on what other people are up to.  In the last couple of years, though, I've been aiming to "get out more", both in terms of actual events, and blogging about sex worker issues.  (I used to spend a lot of time debating anti-porn feminists in public and semi-private online forums, but I'm done with wasting my energy on that stupidity.)

At this year's Desiree Alliance conference, I'll be presenting twice, once on my own, and once in a group.  Here are descriptions:

"Solo girl": An introduction to operating your own porn site

A "solo girl" site is adult webmaster terminology for a site that features content primarily of one model/performer, and tends to be focused on nudes, masturbation, and/or fetish content.  Furry Girl has been operating her own solo girl site, FurryGirl.com, since January of 2003, and has also expanded into running a small online store and three other niche porn sites.  Unlike most solo girl or amateur sites that purport to be run by the model they feature, but are actually run by the woman's husband/boyfriend or a company, FurryGirl.com has been mostly solo adventure.  Furry Girl will walk you through the basics of why you might want to run a solo girl site, some legal and business issues to be aware of, privacy concerns, deciding on your online niche/persona, needed equipment and computer gear, why you need to know how to run everything by yourself, content production and editing- including shooting your own photos, building a navigable adult site, billing, promotion, viewer interaction, managing an affiliate program, and networking with other adult webmasters.  (Since she's not a man or a trans person and doesn't have personal experience running queer/male/trans solo sites, the focus of Furry Girl's presentation and its language is on women, but most of the information is applicable to other genders as well.)

Everyone who's always asking me how to start your own porn site - here's your chance to get an introduction to the topic!  I'm probably not going be posting my presentation online afterwards.  I'm wary of setting myself up as a porn advisor because I've already met a ton of unsure time-wasters who want me to hand-hold them through the long process, and those who get pissy at me because I'm not telling them what they want to hear when they ask for my opinion.  I'd rather set the standard that if you're interested in starting a real business, you can trouble yourself to attend a conference for your new chosen profession.  That's really not a huge barrier to entry - it shows that someone is serious, and not just flirting with an titillating concept.

And the panel, which will be the last of the day to allow more room for Q&A:

Safety for Sex Workers Through Personal Privacy: Digital and Real-World Techniques For Safeguarding Your Identity and Your Life

From pornographer/web model Furry Girl: As someone who's a model and a small business owner, I'd like to point out the potential identity breaches rooted in the United State's federal 2257 laws.  I'm not a lawyer - so my focus is explaining from an indie pornographer's sex worker's perspective how 2257 laws put everyone in a bad place and work to stifle free sexual expression online.

From author and escort Amanda Brooks:  Offline privacy and money management.  I will offer simple, legal methods of disassociating your real name/home address from your work name.  It can also be important to keep your real name and actual place of residence separate from one another.  Learn which prepaid card can be used for registering domain names, do business banking without opening a business account, and discreetly move your earnings across state and international borders.

From author and former escort Dr Brooke Magnanti (aka Belle de Jour):  My contribution will be focussing on maintaining privacy in traditional media - how to publish anonymously, sign contracts, and give interviews without compromising anonymity.  It will discuss using limited liability companies to your advantage and managing profits to minimise tax burden.

Professional hacker (and official sexy geek) Alex Sotirov will be covering online/digital privacy, with a focus on how your activities can be tracked online and what steps you can take to try and maintain as much anonymity as possible on the net.

To see what else is in store for attendees, check out the Desiree Alliance schedule.

If you're going to be attending, drop me a comment so I can get excited about hanging out with you.  Also, if you're a sex worker, I'd love to know your questions on either my porn talk or the privacy panel - there might be something I'm missing that I can incorporate into either presentation.  Both talks will be filled-to-the-brim with information, but it's nice to check in with my readers and see what you'd most want to hear on either topic.

"See, the problem with raids is that you have the people who want to rescue women and children who are in prostitution, using the oppressive arms of the state - the most oppressive arm of the state, which is the police - to conduct this 'rescue operation' through a raid.  [...]  The community is never ever going to respond to anybody who is bringing in the police to rescue them, because they do not view that as a 'rescue'.  They view that as another oppressive thing that's done to them."

-- Meenu Seshu, founder of SANGRAM in India, in Caught between the tiger and the crocodile on sexworkerspresent.blip.tv

"Monday and Tuesday were extremely slow.  Not only did the bell not ring a lot (I spent most of my time napping or doing my day job), but I wasn't closing the deal.  Too many Larry the Cable Guy truck-drivers who wanted the world for $100, ideally $20 if they could get it that cheap.

I wasn't being a team player, but I needed to find the balance of feeling good about myself, making money and taking care of the house.  It's not an easy spot to find, especially since the house encourages you to go ahead and have sex at what amounts to street prices.  If I wanted to be sucking dick in a car in an alley, I'd already be doing it.  Yes, this is some of the class issues I was talking about.  For an American in the US, it's easy to spot class (might not matter or be so clear-cut in another country).  And I know what sort of class of man I like best, and who appreciates me properly.

Besides, I grew up with those redneck, trailer-trash, KKK-loving bastards and I really have no intention of giving them pussy if I can help it.  Not mine, at any rate."

-- Amanda Brooks, in the right to say no - days 6 and 7 on texasgoldengirl.com

I recently read and appreciated Amanda's posts about working in a legal brothel in Nevada, which answered a lot of questions I've had about that system.  I especially identified with this bit, since I also grew up amongst racist and ignorant people, and most certainly would never want to fuck any of them for the price of a meal at TGIFriday's.  Hell, if that's what I wanted, I would have stayed in flyover land and married one of those guys.

A little background: I grew up as the freakish nonreligious kid in a conservative part of the country.  I'm not one of those people who was raised in a big liberal city or whose parents taught them college-level concepts before the other kids could even read.  I grew up around people who told me that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by Satan to trick us.  I've always been drawn to nature and science, and have spent almost 14 years paying attention to the evolution wars - ever since the subject came up in biology class in seventh grade.  Sexuality activists can learn from the contemporary creationist movement's most successful strategy, and how to not play into it.  I've touched on this topic before, but wanted to write about it in more depth after watching not just anti-sex worker activists, but also supposedly "pro-porn" feminists, using this tactic over the course of this month's re-hashing of the porn wars.

To get a two-hour crash course in the modern creationist movement, I recommend watching Expelled, courtesy of The Pirate Bay, whose motto should be For When You Don't Want Your Money Supporting Something™.  The movie is a "documentary" narrated by conservative actor Ben Stein, aimed at "exposing" the horrifying "bias" within American schools to not teach Christian myths often enough in science classes.  (Unlike other countries with indoor plumbing and electricity, Americans already do have so much creationism in their schools and public life that most of them don't believe in evolution.)  The film clumsily pushes the idea that atheist radicals like biologist Richard Dawkins are taking over science and shutting down any "debate" about creationism.  Stein gives the topic the full loony treatment - which, of course, includes a stroll around Dachau to sensitively remind viewers that a belief in evolution and science invariably leads to Nazi death camps.  Stein never plainly states in the movie that he's a creationist who doesn't believe in evolution.  He argues that anyone who definitively supports evolution is trying to "silence debate about these important issues", playing like he's just a doe-eyed and confused Joe Everyman who thinks we the people have a right to hear "all opinions" on an unresolved matter.

Creationists might be intellectually-stunted to the point of hilarity when it comes to their interpretations of the world around them, but they are a very clever and well-funded bunch when it comes to getting their ideas wedged into American society.  Their most important and successful tactic is a propaganda campaign that they call amongst themselves "teaching the controversy": to not deny evolution outright, but to drum up "debate" and make the public think that the jury's still out about whether or not the world is 6000 years old.  In reality, no credible institution or researcher lends any believability to the idea that there's a "controversy" in the scientific community over whether or not Christian mythology negates everything we know about biology, geology, and physics - but that's just a minor unmentioned pesky detail, like there being no credible studies to suggest any harm in viewing porn or decriminalizing prostitution.

Creationist nutters aren't the only special interest group that is hell-bent on "teaching the controversy".  You see this sort of thing all the time with other areas where a person knows their own religious/moral beliefs have no factual basis, and that there's likely lots of solid evidence against their position, so their only hope is to cloud the issue to make their own position look more tenable.  Such as:

"Oh, I'm not against abortion!  But I do think young women should know that a lot of people have been asking questions about whether women who get abortions are more likely to end up with cancer later in life."

"Oh, I don't hate the gays!  But I think the public should know that there's all sorts of conflicting information about how unhealthy it is for children to be raised by homosexuals."

It's a sort of malicious argument from ignorance - someone posits, "I can't possibly make sense of this terribly confusing issue," - when, of course, they perfectly well do have a side - "so, we all really need to think more about what a grey area we're looking at and not make up our minds so hastily."

In the world of internet debates, this shoddy debate tactic is called concern trolling.  The concern troll is never for or against anything, they've just got "concerns" they need to keep raising.  No matter how many times you keep countering these people, they can keep popping up with some other "concern" that adds further confusion to the issue and makes it harder to discuss using facts.

"I think it's a classic hallmark of psuedoscience - which is that you just keep shifting the goalpost until you get to a hypothesis that's, frankly, untestable".

- Dr. Paul Offit, in Point of Inquiry's "The Costs of Vaccine Denialism" podcast

Lately, I've seen more sex-positive types adding to this problem by reminding everyone that "we" ought to be more respectful of anti-sex worker activist's arguments, and that the sex worker and pornographer community is failing to address these "concerns", such as:

"What about the women who feel insecure about themselves when they see sexy skinny women in porn?" The feminist answer to this is to sell a woman a book telling her that yes, she really ought to feel oppressed and ugly when she sees women's bodies in advertising and entertainment, and to whine a lot about such images being displayed.  My solution is to tell people to own up to their insecurities, and develop positive self-esteem that's not based on comparing themselves to idealized images in the media.  We all choose how we react to the world around us, and a large-chested size two model in a porno isn't forcing any woman to hate her own body.

"What about that study that shows sexually aggressive men look at a lot of pornography?" What about it?  Non-scientific and anti-porn minds take the study to mean looking at porn causes men to behave aggressively, even though such a conclusion is a classic logical fallacy.  I'd respond by telling people to read about the difference between causation and correlation, and to know that there are many more studies from all over the world that show a correlation between increased access to porn and a decrease in sex crimes.  If we're playing the correlation game, there's much more research to suggest that porn makes the world safer and less dangerous.  (Three I have bookmarked are Anthony D'Amato's 2006 study "Porn Up, Rape Down" about porn and rape in the United States, Dr. Milton Diamond's 1999 experience with studying porn and sex crimes in the US and Asia, and economist Todd Kendall's work, including "Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.")

"What about porn companies that don't treat their performers well?" None of us have any real statistics about what percentage of performers feel abused or unhappy with their jobs, and I'm not going to waste my time debating my guesses with other people who are also making guesses.  (My guess, though, is that the porn industry has a higher level of job satisfaction than most other occupations.)  Are some workers in the porn industry mistreated or miserable?  Of course, sadly, but that doesn't make the jiz biz especially evil.  There are exploited workers in every sector in every country in the world.  Further, it is pornographers and performers who are the most likely to know about adult companies that have had complaints from talent.  If you want the real scoop on a given porn company and how well they treat their workers, you don't email a women's studies academic on the other side of the country to ask for a referral.  You ask people in the porn industry.  Sex workers are pretty damn protective of each other and will gladly share if they've ever heard of a company engaging in bad business practices.

It annoys me to live in an age of public discourse where people are coddled and told that every idea is valid and just as likely to be correct as any other idea.  Ideas are not lottery tickets - each with an equal and random chance of winning.  When it's almost unheard of to unapologetically state that a given idea or person is flat-out wrong, the intellectually-lazy public believes that the truth always lies in the middle.  Not everything is a compromise.  Not everything is a debate.  Not everyone's opinion is a beautiful and unique snowflake - sometimes, it's just yellow piss-filled slush.

The sex-positive scene, and the world at large, needs to stop giving concern trolls and those who "teach the controversy" an equal platform with equal consideration.  Their goal is to dump impenetrable grey area paint all over everything so that the well-reasoned text beneath becomes unreadable.  It only encourages them to acknowledge and give legitimacy to their every little whimper and fuss.

As a younger person, I wasted a lot of time and energy line-by-line debating anti-sex worker loonies in front of small internet audiences, and I won't make that mistake again.  I'd rather just make good ethical porn, and occasionally blog about sex work politics to a wider audience.  One of the most powerful political slogans I've ever seen was a Bobby Sands quote on a mural in Belfast that read, "Our revenge will be the laughter of our children."  Well, my revenge in the porn wars will be the laughter of the performers I hire to make awesome smut with me - and there have been a lot of genuine smiles and laughs on my shoots.

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