Sex workers are one of the world's most spoken-on-behalf-of groups, which goes hand-in-hand with us being among the most reviled groups. So many people feel the right to speak on behalf of me and my experiences- generally the people furthest removed from my life and the least inclined to actually ask my opinion on the matter.  Without hesitation, these folks think that it's their right/duty to proclaim to the world that I am exploited and degraded by taking my clothes off for cash, and propose their own moral solution for my "problem".

And, as much as it makes me blood boil to watch these people in action, I'm glad that, from them, I've learned to always check myself on my own occasional paternalistic urges.  I know to never presume to speak on behalf of other people or, as an outsider, assume to know their needs- including the needs of other sex workers in different branches of the industry.

It's a valuable lesson worth repeating: don't act like a paternalistic douchebag who thinks it's your job to speak or act "on behalf of" communities with whom you have little-to-no contact or experience. It seems like common sense, but I wish more people had that understanding, especially people on the left with a tendency to rush in to "help" first, and ask questions later.

This week, I've been thinking about how the many of best parts of me are things I've taken from watching horrible examples of human behavior in others and resolving to do the opposite.  There are times when we just don't have positive role models, or as many positive examples as we'd like, but that doesn't mean we can't still grow by learning from the failings of others.  Like living well, it can be the best "revenge".

The other night, I received an email from a former neighbor.  I had lived next to his family in the Seattle suburbs for two years, and I shot plenty of porn in my rental house during that time.  His email was polite, complimentary of my work and blog, and respectful of my privacy.  That's how to be a good, non-assholey human being.

Many civilians probably end up finding someone in porn whom they've known in another context.  Not all of them are as cool about it as my ex-neighbor, though.

Over the years, I've "reconnected" with a lot of people through my site.  I've had emails sent by acquaintances from my youth, former boyfriends, an old employer, people I once met at parties, etc.  (I've received an equal number of emails from people I've never known who insist they've met me, like a guy working in a German hostel who was so excited I was staying there.  I have never been to Germany!)  Honestly, most of these emails get ignored, even if they're not rude.  I just feel as though so much time has passed since I last saw the person, and that there's probably a reason we didn't stay connected in the first place, even if only because we have nothing in common.

A shining failstar came from a boy I knew in grade school.  He was a bully.

"Dear [my name], this is [his name, spelled incorrectly], god you look good if you are ever in town to [hometown] give me a call and maybe we could fuck, i am married to a bisexual chick that would love to watch me fuck your hairy twat.  I know that we were enemies in grade school but we should see each other again, preferiably in our birthday suits, I love your hairy cunt and would love to here from you at [his email address], please write me back.

Yours truely [his name, spelled correctly this time]"

Yeah, I'll get right on that. I totally got into porn so I could fuck the people who picked on me when I was a kid.

Remember, normals: someone is not all of a sudden a radically different person (or a non-person) because you just discovered they're a sex worker.  Finding out that someone is involved in the adult industry does not give you permission to act like an idiot, or assume that they would be thrilled at the chance to give you some freebies.  You'd think this would go without saying, but I've seen too many ungracious oddballs who did not come with this lesson pre-installed.

This advice also counts for meeting new people who reveal that they're sex workers.  Don't suddenly switch out from whatever smalltalk thing you had been chatting about to ask her for a demo of her cock-sucking skills, or nonchallantly ask if she was raped as a child- as though that's any of your business.

As with all things in life: be the good neighbor, not the horny bully.

After falling in love with free-spirited hookers from the gold rush era, I decided that porno was likely my path into the sex industry.  When I turned 18, I sought out companies that might hire me.

While searching online, I came across a guy-with-camera site where the amateur models were "normal people sexy", rather than "porn star sexy".  (I'm not setting up a false dichotomy between mainstream porn stars and "real people"- what I mean is the difference in beauty standards.)  I hadn't been previously aware, as most people aren't, that porn covers a broad spectrum of sexual interests and truly embodies the concept of the long tail.  Whatever you look like, someone is who is attracted to your body type, and a variety of specialty porn sites exist to cater to all interests.

I emailed a few topless photos of myself sitting at my iBook to the amateur porn guy.  This is my first rejection from pornoland, screen-capped in my archives for posterity:

I was bummed out- not because I wish I had bigger boobs and was going to cry and choose to feel insecure about myself, but because I thought I'd found my fit.

Quickly, though, I discovered that we "hairy" chicks have our very own niche!  I didn't need to shave my cooter to get a job.  With sensitive skin prone to ingrown hairs and irritation when I shaved my pits and legs as a teenager, getting that same rashy pimply look on my ladyparts never appealed to me.

I emailed a few hairy porn sites, and ended up booking a shoot in LA with the one that paid the most in a single chunk.  (I didn't want to travel around the country for $50 here, $100 there.)

The photographer was paid by the porn company $1250 for being awkward at me, and I was paid $750 for being your typical barely-legal model in stupid outfits that middle-aged men think 18-year-olds would wear to be sexy - like cheerleader uniforms or white cotton granny panties with little flowers on them.  (Because, as we all remember about being 18, nothing mattered to us more than trying to be mistaken for being 12.)  On the day of the shoot, the photographer tried to talk me down to less than $600 so he wouldn't have to go through the hassle of sending me a tax form at the end of the year.

The photographer kept telling me that a lot of the girls he shot were just so overwhelmed by horniness that they couldn't help themselves and just had to suck his cock.  (It took all my willpower to refrain from bursting into laughter when he said this.)  He was ugly, fumbly, and so sweaty that his thinning hair got stuck to his head.  If a cheesy movie was portraying the stereotype of an icky pornographer, this dude was exactly what that character would look like.

My LA porn experience was my worst work as a model, which is too bad, because those photos will be out there forever, probably seen by more people than my own site.  I look increasingly tired as the day worse on, (we shot 20 sets in a 12-hour day), and before I was out the door, I'd decided that it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life.  (Although, I now know that plenty of porn companies are much cooler to work for, and even have the decency to feed their talent and not try to get free blowjobs from them.)  In almost every photo, I have the same distant, slightly annoyed expression on my face, but hey- they got what they paid for.

I later found out that I was paid less than I could have been for softcore/masturbation content.  The company I worked for is a major player in the online porn world, but they pay models less per photo set ($37.50) than the model would make posing for tiny punk/queer/DIY porn sites that don't turn much profit.  I'm not trying to cry about economic exploitation- it was a learning experience on my path to my real career.  But, unlike, say, working at Burger King during college, my embarrassment is still visible to the world and making money for someone over 7 years later.  (Remember kids- porn is forever.)

I'm glad things didn't work out with myself and mainstream pornoland.  I'm sure I've missed out on a lifetime of weird anecdotes, but I like being independent.  So - thank you, WebGuy and creepy LA photographer, for being my first steps on the path to running my own company where no one else keeps most of the money made selling my image.

Sex workers and sluts are catnip for those who fancy themselves amateur psychologists.  "What awful things happened to her to make her turn out like that?", they wonder, disgustedly and excitedly, scratching their heads and seeking to unravel what titillating damage has been inflicted upon the presumed victim.  Apparently, one must have been raped by their father and beaten by their partners to turn out so deeply fucked up that they would be like me and happily embrace many facets of their sexuality and body.

Well, fuck you to anyone who thinks that accusing sex workers of being rape/violence survivors is a clever zinger of a debate point.  I have seen self-proclaimed feminists do this more times than I care to count.  They paternalize up their argument a bit, but at the core is a self-satisfied, "Haha!  I bet you've been raped!  You're a victim with no power to make your own decisions, ever!  I totally win the porn debate!"

It's with this history of strangers projecting their scandalous ideas of my past upon me that I've always been hesitant to mention the bad things that have happened.  When accusations of being a rape/violence survivor get turned into a way to attack someone else's credibility and choices, (but only of that someone else is a sex worker, of course), sex workers aren't as likely to speak up about actual, non-imagined abuse.  It's giving cannon-fodder to the enemy.

Before I ever got naked on the internet, I had two partners physically assault me (one repeatedly, another just once), and another choke me once.  Do the actions of these men define me for the rest of my life?  Should "we" give abusers that power?  Must I now wear the scarlet V for "victim" around my neck so that others know to treat me delicately and make "good" decisions for me?  Am I a perfectly-packaged imaginary cliche of a helpless battered woman who "turned to porn"?

Again, fuck you to anyone who thinks so.

All things considered, I feel like I've run through the gauntlet of life thus far relatively unscathed.  But, why do some people assume, or even insist, that I must have had it worse?  Why do so many "progressive"/"feminist" outsiders have a need to believe that all sex workers have been raped and attacked?

It makes me want to go all amateur psychologist and ask, "What awful things happened to this person to make them fantasize so much about sexual women being assaulted and raped?"

Like many loudmouth sluts, I am contacted by people who want to get quotes from me for their school newspaper, class assignment, or an article they're hoping to have published. The following is a guide mostly for college kids, but it also applies to freelancers and writers from small publications/web sites. It's culled from my personal experiences, and I'd like to think it's useful reading for anyone interested in interviewing sex workers.

* The primary rule to remember is that you are asking me to do you a favor by being your interview subject, and you must treat my time and my expertise with respect. You get paid, get a good grade, or sell ads based on generating pageviews. In return, I get a small altruistic glow of hoping that more people will think about the politics of sex work. I'm not trying to be snobby and belabor this point, but often, the more obscure and tiny the intended audience, the more a writer has a chip on their shoulder about how I'm supposed to be grateful to them.

* (As an aside: If you're inquiring from an established media outlet with a significant following, it's different. I have something to gain from reaching large numbers of people. If more people see my blog every day than will ever see your project, it's clearly you who's the one benefitting from our exchange.)

* Be honest (with yourself) about the size and importance of your audience. Don't cop an attitude as though I should be thanking you profusely for this very special opportunity to be in your sociology term paper. On the personal side, I already am getting my opinions out there on my own terms without someone else shaping my words to suit a moral agenda, so "being able to tell my story" isn't a big motivator for me. On the business side, a blurb in your women's studies thesis is the last place on earth where I think I'll make a lot of pornography sales. I once had a guy huffily tell me I was flushing away untold amounts of money by declining to be in his college newspaper. I run specialty adult web sites with niche audiences, and if I thought that The Tinytown Junior Tech Journal was the best place to find customers, I'd already be advertising there.

* If you're coming at me breathless about having just gotten interested in the topic, I have to disabuse you of the notion that you are a unique snowflake for wanting to write about "alternative porn". Not having the money or the debt-lust to attend university myself, I can't know for certain, but I'm pretty sure that colleges these days require all students to write at least one essay on "alternative porn" to obtain degrees.

* While the idea that intelligent, politically-aware people opt to sell sexual services might be news to you, it is not actually a new thing, and it's patronizing if you treat it like a fad. Think of it this way: would you interview a black person and ask, "Now that Obama is our president, what do you think of this trend where people of color say smart stuff and achieve things with their lives?" Clever people have been amongst the ranks of sex workers since the dawn of time, so please don't assume that we began existing three months ago when you first discovered Suicide Girls. The non-newness doesn't make smart sex workers any less compelling - far form it - I'm just not into being treated as an amusing novelty.

* Never, ever tell me that you'll only "let" me be interviewed by you if I tell you my real name. I've had several people do this. It's like walking up to a stranger and saying in a smarmy voice, "I'll let you give me $20, but only if you buy me an iPhone, too." It's all fail.

* Do not contact me at the last minute because you have been procrastinating and need an interview done in a day or two. I'd say a week is the minimum notice you should provide. Nothing makes an interview subject fell less special than being treated as your half-assed last-ditch effort at cranking out a quick essay.

* Do tell me the deadline for your project. It's incredibly dickish if, after I answer your questions in a week, you reply back and tell me your project was already due and you can't use my quotes any more.

* Do some basic background research and familiarize yourself with what I do. Make your questions count. Ask me things that show you've actually put more than 2 minutes of thought into the topic. Read the public pages on my web site(s) that you are interviewing me about. It's rude to expect me to fill in every single blank for you when it's obvious that you've never really looked at any of my work. For example, one of the questions I've been asked in almost every interview request about VegPorn.com is how many models the site has. Seriously- you can't go to the model page and count them yourself? Or even notice that the site repeatedly states how many models appear on it?

* Search for interviews that other people have conducted with me so you can get a feel for what I think about things. Or read my blog. You can then tailor your own questions more specifically to me so I don't feel like I got a form letter that you sent to dozens of other indie porn webmasters.

If you're a socially inept person who cannot follow these rules, you are still welcome to conduct an interview with me live on my web cam at the rate of $4 a minute. You'll get to see my tits and have an anecdote to repeat to your straight friends for years to come.

Deep in the Furry Girl archives, I have a scanned bit of my early writing. Judging from the handwriting and poor spelling, I would place this as having been written at age 6 or 7 at most, reflecting on life when I was about four years old.

Feminism is the shitty relationship you had in your early 20s. The lover who was charismatic and creative and gave great handjobs, even though, in moments of clarity, you could see that the two of you had a very real potential for detesting one another some day.

She was dodging a couple creditors, yes, and you'd heard that many of her other relationships ended in dramatic failures. But, the two of you could stay up all night drinking Cooks by the beach and exchanging breathlessly clever observations about the world around you. He was theoretically down with the number of notches on your bedpost, but in practice, he could get all pouty, or even confrontational, about how your sexuality made him uncomfortable. She had a great record collection, could do neat tricks on her unicycle, and she always knew the days of the month when museum admissions were free. You were willing to put up with seemingly minor insults to your dignity, like doing his laundry and picking up the tab for dinner most of the time.

When something would go inevitably go wrong, you'd attempt to convince yourself that the problem wasn't really her fault, even to a point of ridiculousness that makes you cringe in retrospect. "He's stressed and afraid of losing his job right now since they caught him stealing company property and eBaying it, so it's not the time to pick at him about the fact that when it was his turn to get groceries, he bought only a 24 pack of cola and a can of blueberry pie filling."

You glossed over her problems and dismissed them as "that's not the real her" until the red flags just got too big to ignore any longer. You finally cut your losses and realized that even if he's only truly shitty some of the time, it's still too much.

After it ended, you resent them all the more not just because they still owe you two months of rent, but because you tried so hard to make it work. Years later, you can still get worked up about the relationship because you went out of your way to overlook their serious faults and only acknowledge their good traits. When she failed you and was clearly at fault, you blamed yourself for interpreting her incorrectly. You tried to fit yourself into his pre-existing framework, rather than finding someone who didn't require that you shuffle any part of yourself the first place. You're mad at yourself and a bit embarrassed for putting up with the whole thing for as long as you did. You despise the whole thing with an almost undue passion because you once cared about making it work so damn much.

In my mid-20s, I finally sat down and mentally wrote a dear john letter. "The thing is, feminism, it's not me, it's definitely you..."

And for what it's worth, feminism never even bought me a can of pie filling.

How did you get into sex work?
When I was 17, I read a book called Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush by Lael Morgan, and was fascinated by the strong, feisty, independent women who left behind comfortable lives and families to become sex workers in the harsh north.  I pondered my options for joining Team Ho, and decided to give porn a try once I hit 18.  I did my first day shoot in LA in May of 2002 for a big online porn company, where the creepy, fumbly photographer and I cranked out 20 solo photosets of me in various outfits, looking increasingly tired/bored as the day wore on.  I was paid $750, and the porn site paid the photographer $1250.  I realized I was doing it wrong, and researched starting my own company.  I launched my first site in January of 2003 with a startup cost of a few thousand dollars.  I now operate four membership porn sites, three of which are comprised mainly of other performers/models, and a small specialty store selling vegan sex products.  I don't make piles of easy money the way many people assume I do, but I love calling all the shots and not having to work for anyone else.

So, uh... what kind of sex worker are you?  Are you a hooker?  Why not?
I work primarily in indie porn, and also do private web cam shows, which is like being a work-from-home peep show performer.  I've also dabbled in a little bit of pro-domming/fetish work in person, but that's rare.  Since 2002, I have been involved in things where money has exchanged hands, involved all genders, and orifices have been penetrated in every configuration, but I have never actually had a man pay me to put his penis in me.  I find that funny.  I am not at all morally opposed to prostitution, I just doubt it's for me.  Never say never, though.

You were obviously raped or molested as a kid, right?
No, but thanks for trying to use that as a means to discredit me.  It's very "right on" of you to use accusations of surviving sexual violence to make fun of women and deny them a right to make decisions and express themselves.

What's your educational background?
I have a general disdain for the theory class.  I barely completed junior high, and I use the term "completed" only in the sense that they allowed me register for high school, where I soon stopped showing up all together.  Before totally dropping out, I started out as an overachiever kid with killer standardized test scores and dweeby extracurriculars like the Science Olympiads.  Then, I had the important epiphany that school was optional, and that there were much more engaging uses of my time and energies.  Dropping out of school is, by far, one of the best decisions of my life.

What are your politics?
I am an antiauthoritarian pragmatist who has a low tolerance for pretension, bullshit, and asshattery.  I pick and choose the best bits of many philosophies like a cheapskate assembling a full meal from cocktail garnishes and condiment packets.  I am an atheist with an equal-opportunity distaste for all religions, since every single religion is anti-sex, anti-woman, anti-queer, anti-critical thinking, and anti-science.  I rejects all forms of superstition and faith-based "medicine," from communion to homeopathy.  I am also vegan, because I don't believe in exploiting and killing others for my temporary amusement, including animals.

Why would you NOT want call yourself a feminist?  Barring being a feminist, the only option left is that you must be a misogynist.
I don't call myself a suffragette, either, but that doesn't mean I am against women being allowed to vote.  I consider myself very much anti-sexist and pro-equality, because sexism is still a problem in my society.  However, oppressive attitudes based on gender and sexuality are frequently perpetuated by people who call themselves feminists, and anti-male sexism (perpetuated by feminists in particular) is on the rise.

What could you possibly have against feminism?  It's the bestest thing since rainbow kitten cupcakes!
For starters: "feminism" doesn't have anything close to a singular meaning, so you can't even discuss it without a hundred qualifiers and caveats; the feminist pendulum in the West has run its course and too often turns into pointless misandry; feminism used to be about women's right to be more than just barefoot and pregnant, and now it fights for the "right" of women to be barefoot and pregnant and be given a ton of government and corporate handouts for churning out babies; feminism is commonly embraced by people whose underlying beliefs are that women are stupid, feeble creatures who need to be controlled and saved; feminism these days focuses way too much on imaginary first-world problems like women who choose to feel badly about themselves because they think they're not pretty enough; some feminist leaders are obsessed with fanning and exploiting insecurities in women in order to indoctrinate them to their style of victim feminism, rather than being positive and helping women see that they can be strong and powerful.  Last but not least: it's REALLY FUCKING DIFFICULT to spend your entire life being picked on by girls and women for various reasons, then swallow the idea that women are your true sisters and that men are the cruel enemy that oppresses you.  Bitches be crazy, yo.

What do you mean when you use the terms "feminist" and "feminism"?
Except when noted, I'm referring to the feminisms of Western, industrialized nations - the sort spouted by shrill, irritating people with too much time on their hands and a bizarre desire to feel oppressed by everything.  I know that not all feminists are anti-sex crusaders and/or feeble-minded hysterics, but those rare exceptions don't disprove that the majority of feminist-identified people are oftentimes working against the things I believe in, not for them.

Are you a mean and spiteful person?
Only some of the time.  I come across more abrasive online than I am as an overall person because I don't create heaps of "filler content" for my "online persona" the way other "internet personalities" consciously do while building their brand.  I don't have the time or interest to create pointless fluff to try and make myself seem relatable.

I'm a journalist/student/blogger/aspiring author, can I interview you?
Maybe.  I hate doing interviews in general because so many people usually only want me to talk about pointless navel-gazing bullshit like "can sex work be empowering?"  Please read my post for writers and students before contacting me.

Here's a link I found to a feminist blog post that's anti-sex work, will you come jump into the comments?
I get a lot of people sending me links to anti-sex work blog posts, urging me to go and set everyone straight.  Sorry, I've wasted enough of my life debating with random internet users on their own tiny blogs and forums.  It bores me to tears now.  I fully welcome you to jump in and fight with them if you like, though.

[Last updated September 2011.]

For a long time, I resisted starting a blog. I don't want to be another node in the pink ghetto who writes my take on the story of the week in between tales of getting fucked and the latest free photo galleries from porn sites I jack off to. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with those things, it's just that other people already have it covered.

However, I think there still exists plenty of room for blogs about sexual politics written by sex workers themselves. We're a group of people who are ignored and excluded from all sorts of dialogues, and hated fiercely by people on the right and the left, so I have more of a motive to write in defense of sexual autonomy than I do to write a review of how I attempted to get off using the latest high-tech strangely-shaped sex toy.

After working on the outskirts of the porno industry since 2002, I have steadily been moving from wanting to modernize and re-define the concept of feminism to wanting to stop beating that dead horse entirely. Many of my friends and favorite people consider themselves feminists. A lot of my enemies consider themselves feminists, too, and they exist in larger numbers, with better funding, and with better brand recognition as the face of feminism. (Why fight like mad to have your awesome new organic fairtrade beverage be recognized as "Coca Cola", when there already is a firmly established Coca Cola company that sucks? Why not just focus on being great under your own power, with your own title?) I spent way too much of my own time trying to shoehorn myself into feminism, and I look back on that as an embarrassing waste of my energy.

Feminism as a word/identity is used to describe so much of everything that it has ceased to mean anything at all. Is fucking people for money feminist? Is climbing the corporate ladder feminist? Is wearing an abaya feminist? Is shaving your pussy feminist? Is being a stay-at-home mom feminist? Is BSDM feminist? Are sewing and crafting feminist? Is makeup feminist? Is being a woman in the military feminist? Is broccoli soup feminist?!?! You have people lined up, ready to fight to the death over their absolute certainty over whether or not such things are truly feminist. (What the word "feminism" stands in for, of course, is deemed permissible by the "right" kind of people.)

In general, I'm tired of "feminist" being used as a blanket qualifier to mean "awesome", especially when it comes to the concept of feminist porn. I think "awesome" works just fine as a qualifier for awesome.

I seek to advance the idea the first person in any debate to propose that their position is correct because it's the most "feminist" has hereby lost the argument. I have been guilty of this one plenty of times in the past, but I can learn from my mistakes.

I feel like I've taken back something, like friends have taken back "fag", "fatty", or "cripple". I've taken back "not a feminist" and claimed it for myself, and in doing so, have disarmed a lot of people who've hurled it at me as an insult in debates. I wasted a lot of my time and energy arguing over whether or not I'm a real feminist and if my work - and the work of other sex workers - can be construed as feminist acts. So now, rather than get all upset when an asshat says I'm not a feminist, I can shrug it off and say, "yeah, so what?" I feel like this dismissal "empowers" and "liberates" me more than anything else that modern feminism could ever hope to provide me.

One of the things that's been batting itself around in my head over the years is, "What purpose does 'feminism' serve, today, in industrialized nations? Why the need to identify as a 'feminist'?" I've never seen a satisfactory answer. Much like quizzing someone on their religion, the answers are some defensive permutation of "it just is!" For some folks, that's sufficient, and I won't try to wrest their important identity label from them, but I need tangible reasons to do and believe things.

Writer Jorge Luis Borges famously described the Falklands War as "two bald men fighting over a comb", and that image perfectly describes the war for the title of "feminist", too. Why are we supposed to want what it is that we're fighting for?

I've pumped a lot of quarters into this here claw machine, but sheer stubbornness kept me from realizing that I didn't even want a small stuffed animal.

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