I sometimes worry that I come across online as a mean and spiteful person.  This is an inaccurate picture of me, but it's my own fault for not creating enough filler content about myself.  The thing is, I simply don't feel moved to write an impassioned treatise about a great marinara sauce I made, or a funny video I saw on YouTube, or even a hot fantasy that popped into my head while masturbating.  (I'm simply awful at trying to translate sexual experiences into arousing and readable text.)  I'm someone who writes about things that really upset and engage me.  My mental subtitle of my blog is a quote from one of my heroes' standup routines: "This is just a series of things that are pissing me off."

To balance that out a bit and make me seem less like an insane bag lady always yelling at buildings and statues, here's a more harmonious post on my life as a pornographer.

The time: 6 months ago.  The setting: a Russian boat doing a cruise of the Antarctic peninsula.  The goal: editing a lot of porn and seeing a lot of cute animals.  (The resulting non-pornographic photos?  Here.)  The following are a few thoughts I wrote during my voyage and have had hidden away in my drafts folder.  Now that it's oppressively hot outside, it's time to remember getting cold.

To start, here's a snapshot of me in my small top bunk, editing a scene for Cocksexual.com with Bella Vendetta, Jiz Lee, and Syd Blakovich:

On our first day of sailing in open seas, passengers didn't have much to do besides attend lectures on things like different types of seabirds and why global warming is bad, which I mostly skipped so I could do some work.  I was in the middle of editing some photos of Calico when an announcement came on that a group of three female humpback whales was off the side of the boat.  I closed my computer, put on my fuzzy boots, and joining dozens of other people racing up the stairs to get a quick glimpse at the whales as they moved into the distance.  It's a strange and wonderful thing to be interrupted from editing pornography by whale sightings.

It had been my intention from long before my cruise was booked that I make strapon porn in Antarctica.  I had wanted to do it actually out on the ice, but during our off-ship excursions, we ended up being much more supervised than I thought we would.  (Which is a good thing- I'm glad staff told people to not try to harass penguins or scramble around on delicate areas.  Though, it was amusing to watch the Japanese couple repeatedly pretend they didn't understand English only when they were told to not try and pet the penguins.)  As the days went on, I also couldn't sniff out any real perverts or oddballs on the ship to help me out behind the camera with shooting some naked or strapon photos.  I asked the cute Australian guy I'd been chatting up and he got all blushy and said that would be too "awkward" for him - despite my repeatedly asking him.  Poor normal boys - scared of my cock.

With a number of people around all the time, I accepted that getting naked off the ship would mean exposing myself to them.  Not a worry - I'm not shy.  So, on a "warm" day, I asked the nicest guy on the cruise, "Can I borrow you for a minute?"  We tourists were always doing this - flagging someone down to take our pictures in front of something.  He knew the drill and trudged over as I handed him my camera, asking, "You're not offended by nudity, are you?"  He was not.  I quickly stripped off my many layers , including my boots and two layers of socks, and ran out into the snow.  He quickly shot some photos of me as a staff member looked amused but slightly uncomfortable, and then I raced to put my clothing back on.  My feet hurt for the rest of the day - not officially frostbite or anything, but I felt like I was walking on pins.  But look at the glory that resulted:

I think I became the gossip of the trip after this.  I even had one woman pull me aside excitedly a few days later and ask ,"Is it true what they're saying - that you got naked?!"

So, my first pornographic mission was accomplished, but I was running out of time and desperate to make use of my pretty new white Joque harness.  While it's one thing to ask a person to shoot some nudes of you, it's another to ask him to shoot photos of you jerking off a big strapon.  I ended up taking those photos myself, aboard the ship.  These were shot off the coast of Deception Island, which is off the northern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.  I returned on an early boat from that morning's outing so I could make use of the side decks while people wouldn't be milling around on them.  I don't know if anyone saw me, but it would have amused me greatly if one of the elderly couples decided to go for a stroll on the deck at that moment.

Success!

(See more of the nudes by joining FurryGirl.com, and the rest of the strapon set by joining Cocksexual.com)

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.

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.

As the dust settles a bit in the wake of all the discussion about Stop Porn Culture, many bloggers are still trickling forth with their own "and this is what all sides keep missing in their posts about the matter" posts.  It's good to see the discussion keep going, and I'll be the latest to hitch my wagon on the end of the ongoing "people are missing the real point!" train.

A running theme I saw in the conversation about Stop Porn Culture, as well as at other times, was people commenting that we need to prove to anti-porn activists that feminist porn exists.  These people's hearts are in the right place, but I don't think that tactic has any chance of swaying feminists who hate pornography.

Some sex workers and pornographers identify as feminists, some of us don't.  As I complained once in a room full of people shooting daggers out of their eyes at me, I'm sick of seeing the word "feminist" being used as the sole or primary qualifier of whether or not a given idea/product/person is good or evil.  It's sloppy, reductionist thinking.  While I'm not at all against anyone calling what they do "feminist porn", and indeed love what comes out of the feminist porn scene, it's awfully tiring to see people act as though the only ethical porn out there is the stuff being made by a handful of small producers in San Francisco.

When people fixate on the importance of spotlighting and praising feminist porn, I, and others like me, are tacitly being slighted.  Why is the label of "feminist" more important than the actual production of what's been discussed?  How about rather than squealing endlessly about feminist porn, we use the term ethical porn instead?  It makes more sense and actually explains, in simple English, what you're talking about.  It would be nice to see inclusiveness towards all the awesome and ethical non-feminist pornographers (ahem - like me), and you'll also avoid the endless semantic debates with anti-porn activists over what feminist "really" means.  Sidestep that bullshit - it's a useless distraction, and you'll never win an argument with it.  Believe me, I spent years trying.

When we get lazy and use the word "feminist" as an all-purpose stand-in for "ethical", we create a false dichotomy by inferring all porn not marketed specifically as "feminist" is not produced ethically.  This helps our enemies fracture us, and it hardly fosters productive dialog about the real politics and ethics of porn production.  If we want to have open discussions about labor and production issues - rather than endlessly rebutting baseless accusations that watching porn turns men into rapists - we need to drop the loaded terminology and use proper descriptive words.

It's also irksome to see the way in which many people in the pro-porn community rush to decry anti-porner's highlighting of BDSM porn in their materials.  While the anti-porners cherry-pick presenting the most graphic and kinky porn they can get their hands on - images of women being degraded, humiliated, and beaten - the pro-porn retorts to this emotionally-manipulative tactic annoy me just as much.  It completely plays into the divide-and-conquer efforts of anti-porners.  "Hey, most porn isn't violent and degrading!  You're just using horrible examples!  Most mass-market porn is wholesome, not abusive!"  This only serves to further enforce the sex-negative overall social norm that kinky sex is defacto unethical and nonconsensual sex.

Excuse me, but since when did either side research the porn in question and figure out if the examples used by anti-porn nutters were produced under conditions that were agreeable to the performers?  Whether the women in the images are doing artistic soft-focus implied nudes or having their faces rubbed into a puddle of piss on the floor, there's no way to tell by looking at an photo how the performers really felt about being a part of the production.  When you're only looking at and talking about images of a pre-negotiated scene, you're glossing over everything that actually matters.  It would be like asserting that a war movie is an illegal snuff film because you, as an audience member, are certain from the "evidence" you were given that you saw people get shot and bleed to death.  Or, that since you found Hollywood's latest romantic comedy to be light-hearted and fun, you're absolutely certain that everyone involved with its production was treated fairly and loved working on the movie.

Guess what?  I've met a lot of women who work in front of the camera doing "violent", "degrading", and "humiliating" porn, and they consistently gush about how amazing their work is and how happy they are with their jobs.  I actually think I hear more kinky porn performers express happiness about their work, and more often, than I see even other happy sex workers glow about their jobs.  Is that anecdotal evidence?  Sure, but it's a lot of anecdotes - more anecdotes than the anti-porners can trot out in the form of a few ex-performers who later decided they regret their jobs and felt abused by having worked in porn.

To channel my inner Christian Bale: hey, it's fucking distracting when people chase the red herrings of "feminist porn" and "violent porn".  Let's stop that, and focus on the comparatively boring issues of discussing labor politics within sex work.

Last weekend, a conference took place in Boston for an organization called Stop Porn Culture.  Homely academics and anti-sex worker activists gathered to express their latest justifications to one another about why they're afraid of kinky sex and jealous of women who attract the male gaze - er, I mean, why they're against pornography.

Three sex bloggers also went to the conference of (by one estimate) about 150 attendees.  Violet Blue put up a counter-Stop Porn Culture blog, Our Porn, Ourselves, to raise awareness of the fact that lots of women love porn.  (Anti-porn activists struggle to always frame their argument in terms of men versus women and porn versus women, which is an false dichotomy.  They insist that your only choices are that you support women's rights, or you support the sex industry.  They get major constipation-face if you point out the massive plot holes in this gender-segregation story, such as gay porn, dyke/queer porn, and women who are consumers/clients - let alone the issue of women sex workers themselves who are happy with their work.)  Over on Twitter, a group of people were back-and-forthing about the conference, but it was a discussion that mostly left me shocked as to how obtuse and paternalistic some "allies" can be.

At the outset of the discussion, I was reprimanded by several people and told I'm mustn't even joke about porn being evil since I'll surely get quoted out of context and harm the cause.  I wonder what it's like to feel like to be so smugly self-important that you refrain from all use of sarcasm, finely honing every tweet to make sure that no one could ever misquote you or take offense at what you typed, because surely, your 140 character tweets hold within them the future of discourse on sexuality?  I'm always ruining things for the proper upstanding folks - this time, I was guilty of debasing Twitter to a mere vehicle of amusement and brief exchanges, rather than the erudite academic journal for which everyone else uses it.

The core concern from most sex blogger types commenting on the topic, though, is that apparently, "we" need to respect anti-sex worker activists, "be kind" to them, and seek to engage them politely and find common ground - not be angry or sarcastic like me.  Easy for you to say, folks - they aren't trying to put you in prison or take your business away from you.  How big of you to be cordial to those who are not seeking to make your life more dangerous or difficult.  It's no real skin off your enlightened backs to tut-tut philosophically at people about how they should react to their oppression when you're not the one being oppressed.  It's armchair politics at its most offensive.

This isn't just an annoyance of mine with sexuality issues, it's a problem amongst liberals/lefties and how they discuss all sorts of political issues.  I think the underlying problem is that these sorts of people just can't stand the jarring, ego-deflating idea that their opinion as an Very Concerned Outsider isn't as important or valid as the opinion of an insider.  It isn't.  (As a white chick, I would never harangue a person of color about why my opinion of how to handle racism is better than theirs.)

I absolutely do not aim to build bridges with extremists who hate sex workers and want us penniless and in prison, any more than I aim to do so with people who commit anti-queer hate crimes.  I wouldn't really even want to debate them directly, unless I felt the particular forum was large and neutral enough.  People who have devoted their lives to taking away freedoms from other people are not seeking compromises and rational conversation - they are devout ideologues, not misguided random citizens that just need the real facts.

Ours is an info war of changing attitudes, and then laws, to grant us rights, respect, and dignity.  I'm not going to use my energy trying to cozy up with the group of people who are the least likely to ever change their outlook on the issue.  It's simple strategic thinking - when you waste your limited resources fighting impossible battles, you're neglecting a lot of perfectly winnable battles.  For example, if your goal is to get people to become atheists, you don't have to be terribly bright to realize that an effective way of doing so is not by flying to Saudi Arabia and pestering fanatics who have made a pilgrimage to Mecca.  It's not engaging in a "public debate" that could convince a larger audience of your logically-superior argument, it's ramming your head into a wall in a place where the dialog is controlled and utterly dominated by the most hardcore of your opposition.  (I do, however, fully support spying on your enemies in their native environments so you can understand their agenda better.)

One of the women urging "us" to respect people who put sex workers at risk complained that I was "devaluing other opinions".  Twitter being so succinct, I'm not sure if she meant that I shouldn't devalue the opinions of anti-sex worker activists, or that I shouldn't devalue her opinion that we need to work with them and engage them at their own conference.  As I thought about how to parse it, though, I realized it didn't matter.  Why, yes, actually - I do devalue the opinions of people who aren't sex workers that feed a need to tell me what to do.  Whether you're an anti-porn feminist or a pro-porn feminist.

Oppressing sex workers isn't an opinion.  It's an action.  I could care less if these nutters sat in their cat-filled spinster apartments and didn't like porn - that's an opinion.  But they're not content to just not watch porn themselves, they try to force their world view on the rest of us.  Anti-porn and anti-sex worker activists are political organizations that take actions by lobbying governments to restrict sex workers' access to safe working conditions and to imprison them for being indecent and sinful.  Since we're getting technical here, I do "respect their right to have an opinion", but these people stopped having merely "an opinion" a long time ago.  It makes me think of those who were defending the Mormon church for "just having an opinion about gays" in 2008 when they illegally financed the massive propaganda campaign that took civil rights away from queer couples in California.

Being more "kind" or "respectful" towards people who've built profitable careers creating panic, purposefully lying to the public, pressuring governments to pass bad laws, and bashing sex workers isn't going to make them switch teams.  These are not people who can be engaged with in a reasonable debate using facts, calm voices, and warm handshakes.  Being a smart activist means knowing the difference between those who are distinctly and unabashedly your enemy, and those who are on the fence and could benefit from hearing from you.  Being a smart sex worker ally, I would further contend, includes not spending your time patronizing me about why I ought to respect people who seek to drive me out of business and into jail.

(PS: After I wrote this post, I did more catching up on blogs and found that Audacia Ray had already written something on the chatter and counter-organizing around the Stop Porn Culture conference. Here's her post that also discusses the pointlessness of debating anti-porn radicals.)

"Wait - didn't he know what you did for a living before hooking up with you?"

That's the confused, am-I-missing-something-here question almost everyone has interrupted me to ask as I explained the first of my two nasty splits from the last two months.

The answer is that yes, he knew exactly what I do.  He knew before our first drunken makeout session at a party last summer, before our first date last fall, before he ever put his dick in me this spring.  In fact, he went on and on, profusely about how much he supported my decision to be a sex worker and how people ought to treat us with more respect.  He told me that my then-boyfriend was "classless" for having asked me to go with him to a work function as a "web designer" rather than a "pornographer".  He once even used the phrase "honored to help" when presented with a way to do something for the sex worker community.

You can tell where this is going, right?  It's like waiting for the punch line in the latest news story that begins with, "One of the nation's most prominent evangelical anti-gay activists was recently caught..."

This guy made himself officially my first split based on my job!  I can't believe it took me 8 years in porn to find - and copulate with - a guy to drop me like toxic waste for no other reason than fear of personal embarrassment about my work.  (I've seen other sex workers cycle through these assholes more regularly.)  I got the full bullshit parade.  "Look at me!  I adore and respect sex workers!  I'm such a good guy!  I can't lie to anyone!  I respect you and think you're wonderful!"  Until, that is, a couple of weeks after our long-distance half-year flirt-fest was sealed with several days holed up in my place fucking.  Ohhh... so that's what it feels to have a guy manipulate and lie his way into your vagina!

Here's the real punch line, though: the guy had his personal assistant do the dirty work rather than tell me himself.  Aspiring yuppie douchebags take note!  A girl will never forget that special first time when a man's personal assistant calls to lecture her about how his career is just too important right now for him to risk being publicly associated with a girl like her.  Kicking a girl in her most sensitive areas via text message is so lower middle class.  A true gentleman has an employee do it.

Or, if you like cruel jokes with two punch lines: he later did bother to tell me himself that he hoped we could still be "good friends" in spite of his decision.  Since we were never "together", I'm taking "good friends" to mean "I'd still like to put my penis in your holes when I'm in Seattle."  Honey, if you want to fuck sex workers, but don't want to be connected to them in broad daylight, that's not referred to as "close friendship".  It's calling being a paying customer.

Sigh.  And I was doing so well.  I'd only had one other asshole in the last three years, which feels closer to 30 in a sex worker dating years.

Split two was with the boyfriend, which was a more complex situation.  It was my longest relationship.  We'd been in this weird grey area for 6 months leading up to the final breakup in May, when I just couldn't handle dealing with his problems any more.  It called to mind an image of a dangerous attempt by a non-pro to rescue a wildly thrashing drowning person.

Both splits hit me hard enough to knocking the proverbial air out of me, but in different ways.  Thinking of suitor number one makes feel me angry and used.  Thinking of suitor number two makes me feel exhausted and sad.  It's resulted in my neglecting work and focusing on tending to myself, which means in an already recession-plagued economy, the last two months have not been too profitable.

One of the things I've heard many sex workers say over the years, as another is going through a breakup, is "invoice him!"  It seems to be one of our fallback jokes.  I've had half a dozen people implore me of that lately.  But, it's not the sex I want to invoice them for.  I wish I could invoice them for the less tangibly quantifiable degrees of emotional distress and subsequent distraction from work they'd both put me though this spring.  I wish I had something to show for it all other than being wiser in mate-selection in the future.  You can't take that consolation-prize sentiment and spoon it at night, or pay your bills with it.

I needed to get some fresh air.

I headed off to Mexico for 8 nights - unfortunately, though, not at the expense of either of the boys.  (I believe that people who drive you to necessitating stress-related vacations should be responsible for at least half of the cost, like an abortion.)  I'm now settling back in at home, but I had a lovely time on the beach in a rural part of the Yucatan.

I still can't really take much comfort in chalking it all up to experience, but at least I got a tan and some time to disconnect.

Welcome to the second installment of my series of advice that's for would-be sex workers.  (The first one is here.)

I am happy to help rational, professionally-minded potential sex workers fill in some of the blanks they've missed in their own research.  (I've stopped bothering to try and hand-hold anyone through the basics they could read online if only they'd ever heard of Google.)  Most people, once they do real research, figure out that sex work is not actually a real-life version of this carnival game, where you jump in the windy box, grab fistfuls of cash, and then exit without having done any real work.

Of all the emails I receive with questions from new and would-be sex workers, I think that every single one of them has failed to ask an extremely important question: where they can find a good lawyer or a good accountant.

This week, I was asked by another sex worker for advice on what amounted to be, I take it, how to commit tax evasion.  She explained that her finances were a mess, she had no idea where to start, had never filed a tax return, and didn't want to pay taxes on what she was earning, and figured there must be some way out of this problem.  (Honey, none of us want to pay taxes.)  I replied with one simple line, "Sorry, you need to hire an accountant and an attorney."  She replied in an angry huff because I wouldn't give her "any quick advice" on what to do.  My second, and final reply on the matter was, "You need serious legal and financial advice FROM PROFESSIONALS, and I will not risk being held legally liable for conspiracy charges for giving you any suggestions on how to avoid paying taxes."  The part that pissed me off the most was her assumption in the first email, "It seems you are in a similar position to me so I was wondering how you do it."  No, I am not in a similar position.  Plenty of sex workers file and pay taxes.  We're not all taking cash under the table and burying it in coffee cans in our yards or whatever.  Asking me for my advice on doing something dodgy because you're assuming I do it myself is extremely rude.

So, here's golden rule number two for new/prospective sex workers:

You absolutely need to hire an attorney who specializes in adult businesses in your area.  Also, hire an accountant who specializes in adult entertainers.

Let me say that again, since it obviously needs to be said, and no one listens to me when I implore them of it:

You absolutely need to hire an attorney who specializes in adult businesses in your area.  Also, hire an accountant who specializes in adult entertainers.

I value a lot about the sex worker community and people coming together to help one another out, but I am sick of seeing non-lawyers and non-accountants exchange incorrect advice about their legal and tax issues.  How many times have you read one escort advise another that if you ask the client if he's a cop, he has to tell you?  Or if he gets naked (or has sex with you), then it means he's not law enforcement?  If plenty of sex workers still believe in some 1970s-era crime movie idea about the legality of entrapment, who knows what other inadvertent, dangerous untruths they are sharing amongst each other.  Leave the lawyering to the lawyers, folks- and focus on what you do best.

The very first thing I did when I decided to get into porn was to hire one of the best adult industry attorneys to advise me on how to incorporate, and the laws that impacted me.  In the first couple of years, I hired him for an hour here and there to give me advice on my business and how to keep things above-board.  I will never see that as money poorly spent, even though I was eating ramen noodles and buying my work clothes from Ross Dress For Less.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to talk to a lawyer, and it probably costs less than you'd think.  (I spent $1000 initially, and that was before I ever had a single paying subscriber.)  The law is complicated and changes all the time, on local, state, and federal levels, and your sister sex workers, no matter how smart, are not qualified to dispense legal advice on your problems.  In fact, it's illegal to dispense legal advice if you're not a lawyer.  Lawyers possess specialized knowledge that can keep your cute ass out of jail.  (My first attorney has since retired, and he sold his business to JD Obenberger, who you might recognize from Red Light District Chicago's video series.)  Sex workers can be great for helping each other understand their basic universal rights, like the right to not incriminate yourself if you've been arrested, but for anything beyond that, please, pay a lawyer.

Secondly, hire an accountant who specializes in adult entertainers.  I didn't do this soon enough myself, and I wish I had.  Back in 2003, I think, I hired someone I knew only as "TaxGrrrl" in Michigan off an adult industry message board to do my taxes, and she screwed up, leaving me with a fine for almost $1000.  Now?  I am thrilled to have Lori of TaxDomme.com keeping my financial life in working order.  (And believe me, I am the world's sloppiest housekeeper when it comes to financial organization and orderly creation of spreadsheets, so if she can make my business tidy, she can make your life tidy, too.)

Sex work is about being a responsible professional, and sometimes, that means knowing when you need to turn to other professionals.

Some people assume nothing but the worst about "the kind of men" who look at porn or go to strip clubs or see escorts.  (As though it's just a rare and dangerous "type", and not actually almost every breathing guy on earth.)  There's a caricature of a seedy, unwashed man* in a trenchcoat who is so pathetic and ugly and fucked up that no "real woman" would want him.  A profound loser, and a serious misogynist who acts out his hatred of women by paying them for sex or watching them get naked for his amusement.  He's probably a rapist and a child molester, or on the brink of becoming one.  He is all that is wrong with the world.  As much as I could say that sex workers are historically the most reviled people in the world, I think that title really has to go to our customers.

In my 7+ years of being naked online, I've interacted with a whole lot of men.  Tens of thousands?  I don't know the number.  The men who subscribe to my web sites and buy cam show time with me are almost invariably polite.  (And, if not polite in the most traditional sense, they are blessedly blunt and to the point - typing "finger pussy" in my chat window, or emailing simply "more butt pics".)  I am usually treated as they would treat any other person they seek to have positive interactions with, rather than unleashing the spew of anti-woman vitriol that prudery activists assume.  Sure, I do get some assholes here and there - almost all of them angry at me for not providing them a service I never said I'd provide, like lots of facial videos and anal sex on my softcore porn site, or cam customers who didn't bother to read my description and get all grossed out that I'm not shaved.

When someone is overtly a douchebag to me, I can either berate them back, or most commonly, ignore them, content in knowing at least they're paying for the privilege of being rude to me, which is better than I get from, say, people who step on my feet or spill their drinks on me in bars.

You know who does unload on me and embody woman-hating stereotypes, though?  The dudes who refuse to pay for what I'm selling.  Nope, it's not those horrible misogynist men who pay cash for sexual entertainment, it's the upstanding wholesome men who think they're too good to do so.

Web cam networks are a hotbed of this.  A guy pops into my chat room, says he has a 10 inch dick, tries to butter me up with cliche "flattery", and demands a free show on account of his own sexiness.  When I politely refuse, he immediately types a barrage of insults about how I'm a fat ugly stupid whore, and lets me know he wouldn't even touch my diseased cunt if I paid him.  I adore these flowcharts - as soon as I reject him, his fragile ego gets bruised, and he makes a stink about how he's actually the one rejecting me.  (This is why I tell anyone considering web cam work to never, ever do free chat in hopes of getting a customer.  Free chat is pretty much entirely a bunch of semi-literate dudes trying to talk a free show out of you, and then insulting you for not giving them what they want.)  It's the men who refuse to buy my time that are most likely to act like they own me.

It's amazing how many emails I get from dudes who have the nerve to plainly state that they would never pay for porn, and wear it like a badge of honor, like a pick-up line, like it's something I'll praise them for.  These men seem totally unaware that I might find it insulting that they've virtually walked into my business and told me they're too good to buy my crummy wares, but want to know where the restroom is so they can do their laundry in my sink.  Or perhaps, these clueless men are assuming that I'll reply, "Oh cool, you're better than those icky guys who want to pay me to take my clothes off.  You want to get to know The Real Me without this money thing getting in our way.  Why don't you come over and let me suck your dick this weekend, seeing as how I now know you're not one of those creeps who buy porn."

Anti-sex work activists argue that it's malice against women that motivates a man to patronize sex workers or watch porn.  Why is paying for a service or product proof that someone pathologically hates the person they're buying it from?  Do the moralizers think that about any other occupations?  Do all paying customers intrinsically revile the workers who prepare their meals, teach their children, paint their houses, fly their airplanes, pick up their recycling bins, or fill their prescriptions?

The men who get my blood boiling are the ones who demand that it's their "right" to have women sexually entertain them for free, not the customers who appreciate my time and energy by compensating me for it.  Funny how the anti-sex feminists are so busy demonizing sexual commerce that they end up tacitly on the side of the real misogynists.

* My customers are almost invariably men.  And, since feminists/anti-sex activists exclusively take issue with heterosexual men who pay for women sexual entertainment, I write about men-as-consumers in this post.  No disrespect meant to the wonderful ladies and transfolk who buy porn and patronize sex workers!

This afternoon, I was clogging up your Twitter feeds trying to start a conversation about a topic that has long irked me.  The current iteration of my annoyance started with Sinclair Sexsmith asking people for suggestions for feminist porn for men.  (Which is a totally interesting conversation in itself- one I don't think I've seen anyone else bring up before.  "Smart porn" is for women, and men are tacitly dismissed as testosterone-fueled cavemen who will rub one out to anything.)

The responses to Sinclair's question were the same companies we've all heard of a thousand times.  The Crash Pad Series, Madison Young, Courtney Trouble's films, Carlos Batts, Comstock Films, Tristan Taormino's work, and so on.  There's this relatively short list of producers that comes up every time anyone wants to talk about "independent porn", "feminist porn", "porn for women", or "porn for couples".  Now, I'm not knocking any of these companies - not one bit.  They are rightfully mentioned when people talk about where to get good hot smut.

My annoyance and confusion comes from wondering why talking about "good porn" means talking about who makes good porn that is available as a feature-length physical DVD.  It's this glass ceiling of sorts in the indie/alt porn world, and I can't understand why it exists.  ("Glass ceiling" isn't even quite accurate- it would have cost me less money and time to make a physical DVD than produce the web content to start my latest site, so it's not a financial barrier.)  While the lumbering dinosaur of the mainstream porn industry is slowly realizing that selling DVDs for $30-40 a pop is an outdated business model, the indie/alt/queer porn world is still in love with the format.

Sex-positive porn fans and bloggers generally only mention quality content that's available as feature-length DVDs, skipping over the vast plethora of independent porn that's available online, which actually gives people much more bang for their buck in terms of amount of material.  While a $30+ movie has 60-120 minutes of action, a subscription to an established adult site would have much more video content, plus photography, writing, and in many cases, interactions with performers.  And, more material keeps getting added- it's an evolving and dynamic piece of work.  Plus, you can usually download all the web content and keep it for future enjoyment- just like that porn DVD.  (Of course, I'm totally bias here, because I've been producing web porn for over 7 years, so I obviously like the format both as a creator and a consumer.)

I'm genuinely curious, why is good porn only worth mentioning - in 2010 - if it comes as a physical product in the mail?  While tech-forward people increasingly shun CDs and DVDs and store all their media on hard drives (or just use Netflix/Hulu streaming), why is indie porn still about the DVD?  Why is what I do any less real/interesting than if I burned it onto a shiny round disc and put it in a plastic box?  Even the mainstream jizz biz seems to be slowly starting to offer scenes on demand and instantly viewable online.

Asking on Twitter, two women suggested the love affair with the DVD is because they're easier to pirate, but I don't think that's the case.  Maybe with mainstream porn, but I think that fans of indie/alt/queer porn are much happier to support their favorite directors and performers by purchasing our work.  Plus, a scan of The Pirate Bay doesn't seem to suggest indie porn is massively pirated.  See here, here, here, or here, or here.  So, maybe people have made copies for their friends, but people certainly aren't able to just go easily download something they've heard about rather than pay for it.

Another person suggested bloggers and web folk talk about DVDs because there's more money to be made selling them through affiliate links.  I can't believe that one is true, either.  Standard DVD/physical product commissions (such as what I get linking to Babeland) is 20%.  Standard porn site commission for affiliates is 50%.  So, if I sell a $30 porn DVD through a link from my site, I make $6, but on a $20 porn site membership, I get $10.  Plus, if that person stays a member of the porn site, I keep getting $10 every month.  So, it couldn't be that people talk up DVDs because there's more cash it for them.

So, tell me, internet, why do you usually only talk about feature-length physical DVDs when you talk about quality independent porn?

Note: none of this is to say that DVDs and feature-length porn movies are bad, just that I think they get a massively imbalanced amount of attention compared to web porn.

PS: Hugs and kisses to my sister/fellow independent/alt/amateur web smut conspirators, like Cyber-Dyke, Tasty Trixie, Seska, Joy of Spex, Hippie Goddess, Burning Angel, Bella Vendetta, Anna the Nerd, Adorable Audrey, AmberLily, Fuck for Forest, Masturbation Impossible, and DeliaTS.  (Apologies to everyone I'm forgetting at the moment.)

I've had a lot of smut thrust at me over the years as awful examples of "women being degraded", but none of that has ever truly pissed me off quite like ForTheGirls.com.  It's with that long-standing annoyance that I was disappointed to see that the only porn site to ever really offend me with its disgusting amount of sexism is up for a Feminist Porn Award.  For The Girls (and others in the genre) takes sexuality back about 50 years, insults viewers' intellect and their libido, and tacitly says that all women are vanilla heterosexual chicks who squirm and giggle at the very thought of penises.

For The Girls and other smaller "porn for women" companies feature cheesy soft-focus images, putting forth the idea that in order for women to be aroused, a sexual situation must be framed in terms of love and cuddling.  I love snuggling, too, but it's obscenely offensive to me to suggest that women are such delicate little flowers that we can't handle sex without it being about love.  That, to me, is exactly the sort of mentality that feminism was supposed to be fighting against.  (But, I have that sentiment about a lot of matters when it comes to feminism, which is why I abandoned that sinking ship.)

I don't need saccharine romantic story lines to get wet - I want to see relatable people and fucking.  ("Porn for women" rarely features shots of penetration and other things that supposedly frighten women.)  When I look at porn, I want to see people getting sweaty, aroused, smiling and laughing, being "imperfect", and in realistic locations and situations, not a "fantasy hay loft where the muscular stable boy makes sweet gentle love to me while never ruffling my feathered hair."

For The Girls is just as bad as mainstream "male-centric" porn in the type of body images it promotes- oiled up beefcake guys with muscles, who generally look like they were photographed for some gay porn mag.  The women have flawless thin bodies, just like what you'd see on any mainstream porn production.  The sex - what little of it is shown - is of the extremely staged variety where the focus is on camera angles and keeping the performer's makeup and hair looking perfect.  (Nevermind the fact that most "porn for women" looks like it was shot in the 80s and 90s.)  Apparently, "women" like their porn tacky, contrived, and like something out of a letter to Penthouse Forum from 20 years ago where it's obvious a man is writing his fantasy from the perspective of a woman.

Why is For The Girls' content so similar to mainstream porn, you ask?  Because it is mainstream porn - and I don't mean that just as a personal judgement.  In talking with the site's owner on an industry message board several years ago, she explained how she gets the material she uses on her site.  For The Girls' owner buys cheesey mass-market heterosexual porn content, and removes all the shots of the actual sex, since women don't want to see that sort of thing.  She also buys generic softcore male content and deletes any photos that look too gay.  She then writes flowery introductory text to make the content romancey and (supposedly) appealing to women.  While the site's audience is led to believe that the content is special, "made for women", and focusing on women's pleasure and desires, it's just random porn produced under whoever-knows-what circumstances, with all the icky sex and the icky gay stuff deleted out.  Very feminist and sex-positive, don't you think?

(I've had a number of online conflicts on this topic with the owner of For The Girls, and I wish I had them screencapped for posterity.  Our fights were on a couple of different message boards for women in the porn industry, both of which are now offline.)

For The Girls and the "porn for women" niche is just dripping with the idea that women actually don't like or want sex.  It's deeply misogynistic in ways that aren't obvious on the surface.  (The whole thing reminds me of an Onion article about a woman masturbating to the thought of having a husband, a house in the suburbs, and 2.5 darling children.)  For The Girls' owner wouldn't even bother me if she peddled her product as "softcore romance porn", but don't beat your chest and make a fuss about how your conservative anti-sex "porn" is is what all women - as a blushing hivemind - want.

I've heard that For The Girls does sell well, which is sad, because it's not the only option.  There is a lot of porn out there for vanilla heterosexual women that doesn't belittle them, and is actually directed by women, focused on women's pleasure, and features performers who love their work.  (As well as amazing porn directed by men and transfolk, and porn that's not so vanilla or heterosexual.)  There is just so much kick-ass erotic material out there these days for all women, of all different tastes, and it's a shame to see one site claim a monopoly on knowing what's best for the fairer sex.  It's especially sad to see For The Girls mentioned in the same breath as Buck Angel, Jamye Waxman, Shine Louise Houston, Carlos Batts, Courtney Trouble, and Tristan Taormino - and all the other people who create beautiful erotic material that doesn't condescend to their audience by "protecting" them from sex.

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