It's no secret that my spring was really shitty.  I had two bad splits from people I was involved with, and wasn't feeling motivated to do much of anything besides sleep.  My summer, however has been amazing: filled with travel, good friends, excellent food, partying, sex, and seeing inspiring people fighting for various issues.  If I was a low-IQ midwesterner, I'd label the season "chicken soup for the soul", but since I'm a city-dwelling vegan rationalist, I prefer "come shots for the sapient."

At the end of July, I spent 10 days in Las Vegas - which is the most loathesome place in the entire world - and ended up loving pretty much every moment of it.  I was there primarily for the Desiree Alliance conference, but as coincidence would have it, the 2010 whorecon overlapped precisely with a couple of nerd conventions that I've attended in the past.  I don't think I'll ever have more people I love occupying the same city at the same time.

Thank you so much to the Desiree Alliance conference organizers, volunteers, speakers, and attendees for carving out a wonderful place to be in Las Vegas for a week.  I liked that an over-arching theme in so many presentations (I was mainly interested in the business tract, mind you) was the importance of working independently, and how empowering it is to be calling your own shots.  I couldn't agree more.

One of the things I want to praise is the conference's expectations form, which all presenters and attendees were required to read and sign at registration.  This policy was apparently based on an agreement from Dark Odyssey, at the suggestion of Sarah Sloane.  It's a kick-ass statement on the rights and responsibilities of participants at a sex-positive event, so I'm quoting it in full.  (Same list of expectations for attendees as for presenters/volunteers, just different titles for each form.)  Readers know that I've long had a huge bee in my bonnet about people/conferences not being real allies to sex workers.  Consider this a starting point for making your events safe spaces for sex workers.

Our Expectations of Presenters and Volunteers:

Our presenters and volunteers are the public face of Desiree Alliance, and we ask that all presenters and volunteers agree to support the following ideals during their time at the conference:

A) As a presenter or volunteer, you are in a position of trust regarding attendees' identities & levels of privacy. In order to protect all attendees, we ask that you:

-Respect that some attendees have separate identities for separate parts of their lives; do not disclose personal information about them without their express permission.

-Do not share with people outside of the Desiree Alliance conference any information about who is and is not in attendance.

-Identify them at the conference with the name that is on their badge, even if you know them by another name.

B) You understand and agree to practice the principles of Desiree Alliance including diversity, respect, tolerance, acceptance, openness, and non-judgmental support. You understand and agree to not make any assumptions as to the sexual orientation, partner choice, physical ability, race, spiritual affiliation or belief, class, kink or sex work interests of any attendee.

C)  You understand and agree to practice a gender neutral policy. Desiree Alliance is committed to being a safe, inclusive, welcoming, and positive space for people of all genders. We ask that you do not make any assumptions about someone's gender identity, genital configuration, or the pronouns they prefer. Please respect everyone's self-identification. If you are unsure about how someone would like to be referred to, please just ask them.

D) You will take your role as presenter or volunteer seriously and professionally. Know that you are a representative of Desiree Alliance. You will not use your position to practice or promote classist, sexist, racist, homophobic, or other kinds of bigoted behavior. You will abide by the rules of the conference which include local laws and hotel policies.

I was involved in a couple of presentations, both of which seemed to be quite well-received.

The first was one I did was titled "Solo girl: An introduction to operating your own porn site".  I was nervous about being able to condense all the material I wanted to cover into a 40-minute time slot, but amazingly, I did so, with 4 minutes to spare.  I skipped out on all the personal storytelling, and went at things point-by-point, hitting the most useful and practical advice I could think of for aspiring indie pornographers.  I will not be posting my slides or notes for this presentation online.  It remains my opinion that if you're serious about starting a business, you can be serious enough to travel to an industry conference for your new chosen profession.

The second was a panel I did with Amanda Brooks, Dr Brooke Magnanti (Belle de Jour), and Alex Sotirov, titled "Safety for Sex Workers Through Personal Privacy: Digital and Real-World Techniques For Safeguarding Your Identity and Your Life".  I believe that a recording of this panel will be made available soon, and I'll post that once it appears.  Brooke and Alex are also planning to expand a bit on the material they covered at the conference, and I'll post their notes here.  (Not sure if Amanda plans on posting her materials on her own blog, but she highly recommended the book "How To Be Invisible" by JJ Luna.)  I'll also post a separate entry covering my portion of the panel.  This topic could have easily been a half-day workshop, but I think the four of us did a kick-ass job of narrowing things down to the most important basics that every sex worker needs to know.

To get a feel for what else went on at the conference, see the schedule here.  Personally, my favorites were Dr Joycelyn Elders' keynote, Kimberlee Cline and Mariko Passion's talk on coming out to friends and family, Kirk Read's keynote (watch video), Serpent Libertine and Bebe's ethical sex worker discussion, Nina Hartley's keynote (watch video), and the roundtable on sex workers and relationships.

I especially liked the relationship discussion because it's a subject that's been extra-present in my life this year, and it's good to be amongst other people who've experienced similar issues at some point or another.  I had been with a primary partner/dominant I was in love with, but no matter how happy I was at any given moment, there was always an unspoken expiration date on our relationship.  What he was really looking for for a girl who restrains her kink to the bedroom, her weirdness to an annual trip to Burning Man, and was, overall, a person with a non-embarrassing occupation with whom he could have a litter of children in the suburbs and share a mostly heteronormative life.  That is not now, or ever will be me.

The transgressions I've made against traditional society (as a sterilized, clamorous, out-and-proud sex working pervert) aren't things that most people can deal with.  They're not piercings you can remove, tattoos you can cover, funny-colored hair you can dye back to normal, or the occasional tab of acid you can plausibly deny ever having taken.  They're not surface-level personality quirks purchased from Hot Topic - they're the things that define the core of who I am as a human being.  Through the experiences with my main ex, along with having another guy ditch me solely on the grounds of my being a sex worker, I've been coming to realize how deeply and permanently totally fucking aberrant I am in the eyes of society, and that I need to work even more diligently at repelling mates who aren't okay with who I am.  (I already knew I was weird, and tried my best to warn people of that, but I'm apparently not working fervently enough at this task.)

My contribution to the relationship discussion was pointing out that those of us who are sexually different in some way or another are basically in two camps when it comes to finding mates.  You can try to gently ease people in - such as another person's suggestion that one start out by telling a partner that they used to be a dancer and see how the they react, and then consider telling them the whole truth from there.  This has never been my strategy, because it means hiding who I am by default, and the whole dynamic seems designed to put sex workers on the defensive about the lies and omitted truths upon which they founded their relationships.  It's too sneaky and dishonest for me.  My strategy is one I flatly referred to as the scare 'em away plan.  I am upfront with anyone I consider dating or hooking up with- I want them to run away, as soon as humanly possible, if they know they aren't going to be okay with me making a living taking my clothes off for strangers.  I don't want to build a sexual and romantic relationship with someone - pulling a bait and switch, essentially - and tell them the truth only after they've gotten attached to me.  Such a dynamic seems doomed to fail and hurt all parties, although it does work out for some sex workers.

And anyway, why would I want to fuck someone who might be anti-sex worker?  A few years ago I had a brief tryst with a guy whom I later learned to be a homophobe, and I felt so icky that someone like that got to have his dick in my mouth.  I can't imagine wanting to set myself up for such potentially disgusting and hurtful discoveries every single time I got involved with anyone.  I don't want to fuck or love people who might despise me if they actually knew the truth about me.  So yes, please- let them run screaming, because I'd be running away screaming, too.

Dating/mating as a sex worker isn't easy.  I wish we could have a weekend retreat or unconference on this subject, open to sex workers and their partners.  I wonder if there would be many takers for such a thing if I tried to cat-herd people into doing that at some time in the future?

I Shot Myself is definitely one of the adult companies I'd suggest to other people- whether you're an experienced sex worker or totally new to the idea.  They're polite, professional, feature genuinely artistic erotic content, don't pitch their content in degrading or irritating ways, and I'm happy with the $200 I promptly received in return for my efforts.  So far as my personal tastes go, I like that the site has a good number of unshaved women, and they generally aren't wearing much, if any, makeup.  I'm a very fussy creature, and I have to feel confident about a company if I'm going to give them not only the rights to use my images, but all my personal information, too.

My only criticism is that the site is almost entirely cisgender women, with a few butches and FTM-looking models, and some couples shoots.  I don't know if they're only looking for more feminine/cis women, or if they just don't get applications from butch women, genderqueer, and trans models- but if you are one of the above, why not email/apply and see?

My photos just went live, and you can catch some freebies for the next 24 hours.  Here's a taste of what you'll see if you join:

As always, I appreciate joins via my links, because not only do I get a kickback, but you get a discount, too- so everyone wins.  And, if you'd like to shoot photos for them, I also get a kickback if you list me as your referrer.

Myself and Larry Flynt's gold wheelchair at The Erotic Heritage Museum:

My self-modified guest badge to attend an event at Blackhat, a hacker conference going on at the same time as whorecon:

The day after our conference, Kimberlee Cline suggested that we go to Lake Mead so her dog, Stella, could get some exercise.  Thus began an afternoon of jokes involving wet bitches and hot whores.  Here's Elizabeth from Detroit, Kimberlee, and myself, photographed by Don:

On the way back from the lake, I spotted a Walmart-sized megachurch and insisted we pull off the highway for a photo op.  Here's Kimberlee in the hat and me in the red dress:

"I had but one interest in writing, and it may surprise you to know, it wasn't turning out a book.  I wanted a column.  A big, glossy, Sunday-magazine column in a reputable broadsheet.  I was going to be the girl Millington.  And possibly even start dating a German and dye my hair fuschia as well.

But, I was promptly informed, that was never going to happen.  'It won't fly at the Guardian,' one person advised me.  'Half their Saturday magazine staff threatened to walk after they offered a column to stripper.'  And that was only a stripper.

I grumbled and harrumphed, and that revelation, plus the predictably rubbish reviews from the Guardian and Observer a year later, led me to a single conclusion: it's quite alright to be a self-identified feminist, and a whore, so long as you're Valerie Solanas and want to kill the men you fuck."

-- Belle de Jour, in a July 2005 entry on belledejour-uk.blogspot.com

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.

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.

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.

I'm out to pretty much everyone I come into regular contact with, and have outed myself to strangers countless times.  I personally draw my line at coming out to my neighbors.  It's too much of a safety concern for me to risk setting someone off who knows where I live.  (Although, a previous next-door neighbor found my blog last year and emailed me to say how much he liked it.)  I did, however, unsuccessfully lobby my homeowner's association from a libertarian perspective that we should drop a lease requirement that renters must not engage in prostitution on the property.

Being out will definitely create some awkwardness and tension with discovering haters in your extended social circles, but you're also doing loads of good by humanizing a stigmatized part of our society, of which almost no one openly admits they're either a creator/provider or consumer.  You can help dispel stereotypes simply by showing people that sex workers are not a monolithic caricature of abused, drug-addled illiterates covered in open sores.  As much as I'm loathe to hear people trot out the standard condescending "Wow, but you're so smart!" initial reaction, I know it's ultimately a good thing for everyone.  I also want to scare away potential friends and lovers as soon as humanly possible so I don't waste my time with them if they're decidedly anti-porn or anti-sex work.

Recently, Andrew Sullivan posted "Why The Gay Movement Is Winning" about a new poll.  He notes, "It confirms what we already knew - that ending the closet is the key to equality.  By far the best way to do this is as an act of positive affirmation."

I immediately wondered what such pie-charts would look like over the decades for how many people say they know a sex worker.  While the issues surrounding the struggles for queer rights and sex workers rights aren't perfectly analogous, I think there's much sex workers can learn from a movement that is, in many ways, hopefully where sex workers will be at within my lifetime.

When your opposition depends on secrecy and shame to influence public opinion, openness is a powerful weapon.

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.)

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.

Years ago, I stood in a friend's kitchen on my cell phone, staring intently at his spice rack in disbelief.  I'd just found out that someone I'd considered a trusted friend committed a horrible violation against another person. Later, I burst into tears outside on the street, feeling so sick and pissed off.  Most of this man's friends stood by him.  They made excuses.  They told outright lies.  They came up with explanations about why what he did wasn't actually that bad - if he had done it at all - and why him being such a "good person" basically negated what he might have done anyway.  A man who was very popular in his social circle victimized a lesser-known person, and I was one of the only voices publicly standing up against him.  One of his defenders was perplexed by my anger.  It didn't happen to me.  Someone else continued to live in fear and torment, so why did I care so much?  I was given the choice between many personal friendships, and the political/ethical beliefs I have espoused for years about standing up against those who take advantage of others.  It was theory versus reality.  I made the right choices.  And I lost friends over it.

Last year, a guy in the San Francisco nerd scene posted a "humorous" guide on his blog about how to drug and date rape women.  I Twittered angrily about it.  I asked people to confront him in person at the monthly event he organizes.  I hoped he'd be kicked out of his scene for being such a blatant misogynist.  Nothing happened.  Months later, I brought it up again, and some people who are friends with both myself and Mr. Rapejokes stopped following me on Twitter immediately.  So, given the choice, a sect of the San Francisco nerd world stood by someone who thinks the idea of raping drugged women is hilarious.  I bluntly forced a mutual friend to pick between us, and she picked Mr. Rapejokes and dismissed the topic as "drama".  I was the one who lost friends over what he blogged, not him.  Theory versus reality, and again, I made the right choice and I'm glad I spoke out.

Last week, as my Twitter followers and many others are already aware of, I boycotted the third Sex 2.0 Conference.  I'd attended the first two Sex 2.0 conferences, loved them, and spoke on two panels at the previous one.  I was scheduled to be a speaker this year on a panel about sex work, and I pulled out days before the conference because I refuse to participate in an event that is not a safe space for sex workers.  I've been a sex worker for 8 years, and in case it needs mentioning, I'm big on the idea of places where we can chill out and talk about our lives and our work without dealing with verbal or even physical attacks from those who don't look kindly on us. Real safe spaces for sex workers matter to me.  Sex 2.0 used to be one of those spaces.

Sex 2.0 stopped being a safe space for sex workers when it welcomed in Carnal Nation, an online media company that caters to the sex-positive community.  You see, a while ago, a stalker popped up offering cash rewards for anyone to out/stalk/harass sex workers at their homes.  Carnal Nation defended endangering the lives of sex workers as important "free speech", giving promotion to the stalker and belittling and mocking the women being stalked.  Because of this stalker, people were, and still are, genuinely scared for their safety.

Whatever that official or unofficial connection was, Carnal Nation was allowed by Sex 2.0 organizers to be present at the conference in spite of the criticism of many people.  They could have picked the concerns of sex workers and our allies over a bit of publicity for the conference - barring Carnal Nation from covering the conference - but the organizers picked publicity.  The consolation prize was that if anyone wanted to talk about why they resent Carnal Nation for endangering the lives of sex workers, they were allowed to be interviewed about it. Yeah, I'd love to give Carnal Nation free content for their web site, that's exactly the aim of my boycott.

One of the defenses of Carnal Nation's presence at Sex 2.0 is that no one had to be interviewed - it was just a media outlet that you could talk to.  I've never said I was opposed to Carnal Nation's involvement because I thought they'd force all attendees at gunpoint to give interviews, the point is that Carnal Nation was allowed in the door at all.

What if Carnal Nation was a company known for mocking gay-bashing and dismissing groups that advocate violence against queers as "important freedom of speech"? I have no doubt that such a media outlet would have been barred from Sex 2.0.  Sex workers, however, are apparently not a vulnerable minority that deserves to come together in a space free of media companies that think our safety makes for nothing more than an amusing libertarian argument.  Well, sorry, Carnal Nation, but the women being stalked are not abstract philosophical constructs.  Two of them are my friends - not debate fodder about the importance of yelling fire in a crowded theater.

As a scheduled speaker, I felt as though refusing to attend was the biggest stink I could make as just one person.  (I got a refund for my Sex 2.0 ticket and donated that money to the Desiree Alliance conference - a sex worker event going on this July in Las Vegas.)  This did get people talking: online, on the Sex 2.0 email discussion list, and at the conference itself - both in sessions and unofficially.  I wish I had something prepared for public dissemination last week, however, I've been mulling over exactly what to blog and gathering input from others.  I hope this full explanation makes more sense of the issue to those of you not already familiar with what happened.

I won't be linking to the exact article because of its menacing content, and I ask that if you comment about this issue, you don't link the article, either.  I ask that you not name or link to the web site offering cash for people to out/harass sex workers.  I ask that you do not state the names of the women who are targeted by the stalker's web site without their permission.  Basically, be the opposite of Carnal Nation - be respectful and responsible.  When and if Carnal Nation posts a defense of itself on its own web site, I hope you will ignore it, rather than pouring your energy into their comments section and giving them traffic.

John Pettitt, owner of Carnal Nation, wrote in his short article about the controversy,

While we regard [stalker] as repugnant CarnalNation believes in the right to free expression, if Larry Flynt can offer a bounty for cheating Republican politicians it's equally defensible for somebody to pay for information on sex workers. Neither is a morally defensible position but morals are personal and free speech transcends personal morals. It comes down to a simple truth It's the unpopular speech that needs protection.

In the spring of 2010 CarnalNation will begin letting our users publish their own content in personal blogs. One of the reasons we decided to provide this service is the fact that a well orchestrated mob can cause a service like blogger to remove content they don't like by flagging it for terms of service violation. We won't do that. In fact if it's legal (that is a court hasn't told us to remove it) it will stay up no matter how much we disagree with it. That doesn't mean we won't be critical but it does mean we can only disagree with attempts to silence [stalker].

So, according to Carnal Nation, the most important thing in this situation was that stalkers need "protection" to harass sex workers, because a stalker's "free speech" rights trump safety concerns from a highly vulnerable population that is regularly attacked, raped, and murdered?  Further, that the stalker is the real victim in the situation because people had been trying to get the stalker's blog taken offline?  Of course, John Pettitt tried to cover his ass by saying the site is "repugnant", but he still still gave it tons of free publicity and defended how important it is that we stand up for "unpopular speech", aka, harassing/outing sex workers.  Having the stalker promoted and legitimized on a well-known "sex-positive" web site was done, in my opinion, simply to get a lot of comments and traffic.

And comments there were!  In a section a mile long condemning and debating John Pettitt, sex-positivity super-heroes and sex workers including Monica Shores of $pread Magazine, Heather Corinna, Tasty Trixie, Kat of Kat's Stories, Mistress Matisse, Melissa Gira, Sarah Sloane, Annie Sprinkle, Jill Brenneman of SWOP East, and Sadie Lune spoke out against this irresponsible and dangerous behavior from Carnal Nation - and that's just on Carnal Nation's own web site.  Much more has been said elsewhere.

Carnal Nation has proven that they are happy to cover sex workers as titillating new items, but will quickly kick us in the teeth when we're down.  (Hey, that sounds exactly like the hostile mainstream media!)

Speaking of using sex workers to make a profit, former writer for Carnal Nation, and $pread Magazine editor, Monica Shores, has been involved in a multi-month battle trying to get paid for articles she'd written for the company in the past.  She believes Carnal Nation is refusing to pay her because she's criticized the company, and as of now, has still not be paid for work she did months ago.  Whether or not she ever will ever be paid still remains to be seen. [Update on 6/15: Monica has finally been paid.  But, I've heard from another sex worker and former Carnal Nation writer who is owed money by the company.  It's an interesting trend.  Are there any more people out there who've worked for Carnal Nation and not been paid as promised?]

In speaking out on the issue of Carnal Nation at Sex 2.0, I lost friends.  I made sure I'll never be welcome in the Seattle kink community.  I even received a not-too-thinly-veiled threat against myself if I continue to speak out against Carnal Nation. But you know what really fails to motivate me to shut up about my concern for creating safe spaces for sex workers?  It's threats to my personal safety.

I hope that this whole mess will allow more people to take a moment to think about what it really means to create safe spaces for sex workers.  You would think it wouldn't be that hard for supposed allies to grasp the basics like, "Don't allow in companies that defend violence against us", but apparently, it is.  This was an instance where I felt the need to point at one conference as the perfect example of how not to make an event safe and welcoming for sex workers.  This is a bigger fight than just Carnal Nation, so while I do hate to give them so much attention, and will no doubt be called a hypocrite for doing so, I also want my community to know their true face, and to be on the lookout for more wolves in sheep's clothing.

I feel like an activist cliche to write profusely about a problem, but offer no concrete solution.  I hope all sex-positive people can talk about ways to make more spaces welcoming and safe for sex workers, because it's not just about one offensive web site or one stalker.  It's about living in a culture that has no regard for our safety, our human rights, our dignity, and our lives - and trying to change that culture, bit by bit.  My little bit to add right now is publicly calling out Carnal Nation and hoping that in the future, they will be banned from spaces that are supposedly safe for sex workers.

Conferences are about like-minded people getting together, talking about common interests, meeting old friends, making new ones, and that buzzword that's everywhere now: networking.  In an age where people treat "networking" like it's the only currency that will ever matter, we get nervous about speaking out on controversial issues, even when we know something is wrong.  We don't want to lose a friend, a blogroll link, an ability to use a connection to ascend social or career ladders.  So, what does "networking" mean to you?  Does it include overlooking things people do that are dangerous or abusive, or allowing people to defend those who are dangerous and abusive?  Will you keep your mouth shut so as to not come across too angry, oversensitive, and socially ungraceful?

I'm not afraid to do battle about the issues that matter to me - and every time I do so, I know I'll lose friends and burn bridges.  I do it anyway.

I don't even know what a fucking bridge looks like any more and how easy it must be to have a world filled with them.  But after a lifetime of being a loud-mouthed cunt, I'm a damn strong swimmer.

* * *

(You can read Sequoia Redd's blog post for her perspective on this issue.)

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.

Audacia Ray recently posted a noteworthy piece, Sex Worker Storytelling, Activism, and Dominant Narratives.  Short on time?  Here's (what I consider to be) the meat of the post:

Especially because I run a monthly event in which sex workers are exposing their stories in public, I’ve become hyperaware of the fact that the public performance of sex worker experiences in the United States is very much about the personal adventures of middle class, white, cis women.

I myself am someone who is, in most ways, the stereotype of a sex worker who speaks out.  I'm white, cisgender, and middle class.  But, there's another crucial element to the typical portrait of an Out-And-Proud Teller of Sex Work Tales that I think Dacia missed, the fourth elephant in the room.

In terms of dominant narratives, a lot of them are from people unlike me in that they did sex work for a short period of time as a means to a specific end, most notably women paying for college.  It can feel like there's an overall message of sex work being something a person only does while they're waiting for their real lives to begin.

I started thinking about sex work when I was 17, and mulled over the options in my head until porn seemed like a good fit.  At 18, I tried the mainstream porn world once, didn't care for it, and started my own company.  It's been almost 8 years since I crossed over into the world of sex work, and I have no exit strategy.  I plan to still be taking my clothes off for money a decade from now.  This is where I want to be.  This is my real life and my real job.

I don't say that as any sort of judgement against sex workers who were in the business for a short period of time, as plenty of friends and people I admire fit that description, nor do I think that they don't have worthwhile things to say.  I genuinely don't want to discount their histories and their experiences, but I think it deserves mention that much of the public face of sex worker experience is in the form of a history, a memoir, a past-tense tale of a person's more experimental youth.

Of course, there are vocal exceptions to this - Mistress Matisse being the first to spring to mind.  Tasty Trixie and Seska are politically-inclined pornographers who have both been writing about their lives in the business for some time.  There are an increasing number of blogs written by sex workers, but when I mentally take stock of a Who's Who of people blogging/talking/touring the country with their book about sex work, many/most of the people on the list are retired.

It's hard to think of another profession or hobby where its culture's public face is so strongly defined by people who are no longer engaging in it.  (Sports commentary from former athletes, perhaps?)

Why is this?  I'm not sure.

Is the popularity of the voices of the retired just an accurate representation - do few people do sex work for more than a couple of years?  Are career or long-term sex workers that rare?  Is it easier for people to talk about something once they've gotten some distance from it?  Are the educated folk who used sex work as a means to obtain a degree more likely to be compelled to write about it all?  Is it an overblown fear of prosecution that makes some people not want to talk about sex work while they're still engaged in it?  Is it because there are fewer available options in the sex industry as one gets older, so people are limited - or opt out over self-consciousness - to stints in the business while young-ish?  Is it because these are the voices the general public and mainstream media most wants - stories with titillating adventures that still tacitly assure them, "but don't worry, I'm not a bad girl any more"?

I often feel very removed from "normal people".  This got me wondering, would everyone really cross the big scary line into escorting, given the right set of circumstances?  I'm not talking about fantasy hypotheticals like, "Would you fuck a stranger for a million dollars?"  I mean down-to-earth circumstances, with realistic compensation, and, most importantly, a certain degree of safety.  If I walked into a room of people with a screened client, with good referrals from other providers, and the compensation appropriate for a mid-range escort in their location, how many people in that room would really jump at the chance?

Personally, I think most people would not, but I could be wrong.

I have a number in my head for what I would want to be compensated for an evening with me.  It is, I now realize, the same rate that an established friend of mine charges for an evening.  I asked my naked boy what his rate would be, and it was more than mine.  (Understandably, of course - he is a fantastic top, and he puts oh-so-much energy into things.  Much obliged, Sir.)

So, what say you, non-escorts?  Given the right circumstances of a polite, screened client, and a fair mid-range hourly rate ($300-500), would you go for it?

[Edited to emphasize: Someone on Twitter replied to me and said they might if the client had an "excellent bod" and paid "tons o' money".  NO, NO, NO.  That is not what I'm asking.  It's hardly an interesting social survey to quiz people if they'd like to become rich by having sex with someone gorgeous that they're horny for anyway.  Duh.]

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!

"During the day I work as a writer at a prestigious international institution. I interview diplomats and promote myself as a thought leader. I write about women’s issues, and work for the promotion of women’s empowerment. But I’m entry level so I’m not paid.

[...]

I worked on an article about sex work during the World Cup in South Africa, which my editor had many qualms about. She did not like my inclusion of a quote about the potential for economic opportunity through sex work during the event. She worried that I was not problematizing the fact that women can be economically forced into sex work. She was stuck on a victimized view of sex workers. And eventually she said that really it was part of her discomfort with the broader trend in society that women make more and get ahead more easily by using their sexuality, femininity and sensuality than by using their intellect.

Well. I thought. Then perhaps you should pay me so I can sustain myself through my intellect, not through my body."

-- Ami, in Sex Work, Human Rights, & Feminism Series Part 1: Musings of a nude model on sex work, feminism and empowerment, on paradigmshiftnyc.com

---

I recently got some feedback on my blog that read like an auto-generated essay against porn and sex work, hitting all the key arguments that I've heard a thousand times, just rearranged in a different order.

It got me thinking, hasn't anyone made a bingo card about this yet?  Apparently not, so I made one, with my top 25 most irritating frequently addressed accusations.  (Click here to get a larger version so that you can print it out and play along at home.)

[Edit: Miss Renegade Evolution made a sex work bingo card about a year ago, which I missed.  Go see her version here.]

"Unless you've read _____, you have no idea what you're talking about!  If only you were exposed to the correct ways of thinking, as I have been, you would understand why porn causes men to rape their children, why millions of women die from anorexia because of your industry, and why sexuality is a sacred thing not to be sold."

It's true.  I don't read those top-selling books from the liberal literati.  I spend most of my waking hours creating and promoting body-positive porn that features people of all shapes and sizes and genders.  (A cornerstone of my overall ethic is my deep loathing of people who prefer to whine about what other people are doing rather than get off their asses and actively create change.)

Sorry to break it to the antis - who have new books to sell and speaking engagements to get paid for - the arguments against sexual expression and sex work haven't changed in the last hundred years.  Sure, a lot of people make a good living convincing women of "new" and convoluted ways in which they ought to feel oppressed, but it's all the same old trope, whether it's coming from people who identify as radical feminists or the Concerned Women for America.  Same logic, same propensity to make up fake statistics, same underlying misogyny, same fear of sluts busting lose and ruining it for all the good girls.  I can pretty much guarantee that the "latest" anti-porn/sex worker thoughts from such-and-such prominent author is not going to bring up anything new we haven't heard before.  (There, I just saved you $19.99!)

Of course, I've been told that even if I disagree with an author's anti-sexuality stance, they still have a lot of other valuable insights on other areas that I could probably benefit from pondering.  It's not as though I seek to insulate myself from the opinions of anyone who disagrees with me, but it's hard to take some people seriously in spite of monumental failures in large areas of their philosophy.  When an author's whole schick is about supposedly advancing women's liberation, and they're anti-sex (worker), to me, that pretty much nullifies everything else they have to say about the topic of women (and the liberation thereof).  It's like being asked to consider the analysis of a brilliant "anti-racist" who, incidentally, just so happens to really hate Asians.  So, no, I don't have a lot of time on hand to concern myself with with philosophies of hypocrites, even if there is some facet of their unifying theory of the world that I could take genuine interest in.

It's not that I outright refuse to ever read these books, but I only have so many hours in my day.

I'm too busy adding positive contributions to the sexual landscape to read about why women should feel depressed and victimized every time they walk by an advertisement with a skinny woman on it.  I'm too busy being a woman who operates my own small business to cry about not having huge boobs like the celebrities who are supposedly my models of attractiveness.  I'm too busy making hot smut that rejects many heteronormative porn stereotypes to sit around reading about ways in which men must be nefariously shaping my definition of "sexy".  (Women can't make up our own minds!  We're secretly controlled by the Illuminati, err, I mean- The Patriarchy!)  I get so occupied trying, via my porn, to tacitly assure everyone that they are capable of great sexiness, that I just don't have any energy left to manufacture "injustices" and argue that women should feel oppressed by them.  Sometimes, I'm even so busy being excited about hiring amazing sex worker's rights activists to make porn for my company that I don't have time to read a single tome by Wendy Shalit, Naomi Wolf, or Ariel Levy.

I've been accused of being just another American anti-intellectual when I explain this to people.  And to such critics, I want to reply with of a piece of contemporary philosophy that even a stupid little twit like me can wrap my head around:

It's time to put down your books written by boring upper-class white ladies and just focus on being awesome.

"What is most shocking to people is not that a man, a ridiculously rich celebrity, cheated on his wife, it's that he had at least 13 mistresses! Two of these women were porn actresses, one of whom, Joslyn James, claims to have had a 3 year love affair with Tiger and two pregnancies. Directly after the Tiger Woods press conference, she and lawyer Gloria Allred pointed out that Tiger's apology -- to wife, friends, family, business partners, and fans -- was incomplete. What about the women he used and threw to the curb? Tiger demanded that James give up her career in adult entertainment because he couldn't stand the thought of her with another man. He pursued this woman, manipulated her to give up her independent income to be solely his for three years, promising her all kinds of things, including his love. Many on the blogs are making out that this porn star, Allred, and the other women are the real exploiters. I disagree. Tiger's privilege as an elite male allows him a legitimacy that these women do not have. As sex workers and mistresses they are cast as deviants, while he just made some bad mistakes. He is able to use the proper womanhood of his married wife to further stigmatize the women he cheated with (Elin is a victim and these women were just asking for trouble), and to hide behind some ridiculous claim that he is sick -- with a sex addiction -- and therefore is a victim of his own behavior as well. We should all feel sorry. I dont."

-- Mireille Miller-Young, quoted Abiola Abrams' Tiger Woods' apology statement and video: 25 Top sex and relationship writers and performers react.

I live under a rock when it comes to celebrity stuff, so this was the first full article I've read about the Tiger Woods scandal.  I hadn't been aware that sex workers were among his mistresses.  Woods is hardly alone in having pressured a woman to quit sex work for him out of jealousy, but, I suppose, is now one of the most famous to pull that old douchebag move.

For those of you just joining us, there's been a storm of controversy lately over whether or not Alexa, a prolific blogger who claims to be a high class escort, is a fake.  (See posts by Monica Shores, Jenny DeMilo, Mistress Matisse one and two, Tasty Trixie, and Kat.)

Well, there isn't a really controversy at all- more like a consensus.  Every sex worker whom I've seen weigh in on the issue either blasts Alexa as a blatant fraud, or says that they are highly suspicious.  As I Twittered last night, I find it amusing that Alexa's ardent supporters are comprised almost entirely anonymous nobodies and horny men who post in her comments section.  And, with slight hesitation, I added, "It makes me laugh my ass off to see the only 'somebody' who's supporting Alexa is a woman who's practically a faux ho blogger herself."

That "somebody" is feminist blogger Amber Rhea.  (This rant has been in the back of my mind for some time, but the Alexa scandal, and Amber's reaction to it, has finally brought it out.)

I won't sugarcoat- I disliked Amber from the start.  She embodies all the useless whiney things I can't stand about feminism, with the exception that she "supports sex workers rights".  Amber inserts herself into sex worker circles whenever possible, and to a casual follower of her online presence, she can easily be mistaken for a stripper based on how she choose to describe herself.  (Indeed, Amber's blog feed was syndicated by a sex worker rights group alongside other blogs written by sex workers until I pointed out that she isn't a actually sex worker.)

At first, when I was only vaguely aware of who Amber was, I assumed she was a stripper.  With her circulating in the online sex worker scene and calling herself a pole dancer at every chance she has to describe herself, and blogging and Twittering about her latest pole tricks, is it any wonder how I could have been mistaken?  When I had the time to properly read her blog and Twitter stream, I came to learn that Amber is a white collar office worker and blogger who enjoys taking classes in pole dancing as a hobby.  Look no further than her "about me" page on her blog for how she opts to show herself to the world:

Amber is a smart woman who's obviously thought a lot about both images and language, and as such, I find it impossible to believe that it's an accident that she makes herself look like a stripper online.  Of course, Amber doesn't actually lie and say that she's a professional stripper- she's wisely left herself plenty of plausible deniability.

It's as though you had an online persona where you describe yourself as a pilot and post photos of yourself in uniform at airports, hang out in forums for pilots, and debate issues related to commercial flight, and then look innocent and surprised when people assume you're a real licensed pilot.  No, no- you simply enjoy playing a pilot in flight simulator computer games at home, and have no idea how anyone could have been confused.

I believe Amber purposefully misleads her casual readers so they will give her opinions on sex work more weight that they perhaps deserve.  As many have pointed out in the Alexa scandal, being a sex worker is quite stylish right now, and I've long seen Amber as grasping at the hipness, eager to gain status for her online presence with insinuations that she gyrates for cash.  That's pretty offensive to those of us who've taken the real social risks of being marked for life as fallen sluts.

So, as I was looking at the comments on Alexa's blog post defending herself, it was really no shock that the only recognizable supporter was, of course, Alexa's sister faux ho, Amber Rhea.  Read Amber's template-"feminist" defense of Alexa here.  Or read her Twitter posts here, such as "Really, must sex workers vilify each other?"  (Wow, what a vapid statement on peace-making for a non-sex worker to make about sex workers being rightfully angry at a fake who steals from real sex workers?)

Could it simply be sex workers' criticism of Alexa hits too close to home for Amber?

If Amber wanted to be an actual sex worker ally, rather than just riding sex worker coattails to look interesting, she would learn her place.  Amber is an outsider, and as such, that place starts, ends, and is filled with listening to sex workers.  It is telling about Amber's status as an "ally" that she picked the side of someone sex workers accuse of being an liar, a thief, and even putting us collectively at risk by misleading clients about what to expect.  Given the choice, Amber chose to side against the opinions sex workers and completely dismiss their valid and politically well-reasoned questioning of Alexa. What an friend we have in Amber!

I'm publicly bringing up my thoughts on Amber now because I hope we can learn from the Great Alexa Scandal that it's not just the obvious frauds and liars that we need to be wary of.  To me, Amber's subtle acts of fakery are far more ethically repugnant than Alexa's obvious grand-scale fictions.  Especially since they're coming from a woman who is gladly welcomed into sex worker rights circles by many whom I respect.

The take-home bit I hope people will contemplate is what it means to be a genuine sex worker ally, as well as what it means to be a "faux ho".  I've answered these questions for myself, and I've concluded that Amber Rhea and Alexa DiCarlo look pretty much the same on both issues.

I'll end now, where we began, by wishing everyone a very happy Festivus season.  Maybe my favorite fake stripper will lend us a pole?

Emailers want to let me know that they are turned on by exhibitionism, consider themselves quite sex-positive, love performing, and eager for my advice.  They also often let me know that they'd potentially be disowned by their families and "real friends", kicked out of school, lose custody of their children, and/or be fired from their conservative job if anyone found out.  They want to how to not get "caught".

I tell such potential sex workers: imagine the person you'd least want knowing about it.  They'll probably be the ones who find your alter ego first.

My bad outing story?  Over dinner, some loser my mother was dating yelled at my grandmother that I "suck dick for money", jumping to his feet and pompously refusing to spend another minute at the same table as a whore.  So, picture your own elderly grandmother, with an enraged asshole screaming at her that you suck dick for money.  Can you handle that?  (The irony about this situation, however, is that every time in my life that dick-sucking has transpired and money has changed hands, I have never once been the one being paid to suck a dick.  But I didn't want to try and explain that to an upset woman in her late 80s.)

So, here it is, short and concise, for all my would-be sex worker readers:

The first rule of sex work is: you will be caught being a sex worker.
The second rule of sex work is: YOU WILL BE CAUGHT BEING A SEX WORKER.

Accept those rules before you start quizzing myself or others about how to get started in the business.  Sex work can offer great things to those of us with big hearts, abundant sexual energy, creativity, and business-savvy, but those freedoms and rewards do come at a certain price.

My trip to New York City was a whirlwind of amazing, and I've barely had time to wash my clothes and read my email before I'm back to the airport tomorrow- although, this time, for a family visit.

I knew I was going to visit New York this fall to shoot for Cocksexual.com, and the universe was especially kind in putting together a great week of pervert events so I could have fun in the evenings, too.  Alongside a full dance card of taking pictures of cocks, there was also a sex-positive drinkup, the Sex Worker Literati reading series, the 2010 Sex Blogger Calendar release party, and Audacia Ray's second screening of her Pay As You Go collection of shorts.  (Thank you to the organizers of these events!)

I was able to shoot 8 new models for the site, from cute boner-filled posing to an amazing double-penetration scene.  (This was my first time shooting a DP, and I found it challenging to know what to focus on when there's so much hotness happening all at once.  I love meeting new challenges!)  The cheapie light kit has been great to work with- it packs down small enough that I can fit everything in a large backpack.  In spite of some hurdles like missed trains, lost models, and the A and C subways not operating, everything still ended up working out, and 23 gigs of great porn was shot.

I feel as though I was dragged quickly through a massive scrumptious buffet, and barely had a chance to stick my fork in but a few trays of food as I passed.  I met and caught up with many great sexual intellectuals, but it was all so short.  Ten minutes of conversation here, a late-night dinner there, a quick hug and "nice to see you!" shouted in a crowded bar in the middle, and I have found myself back at home, wondering what happened to me.  As a bit of a recluse, that level of constant social interactions dazzles me, and I wonder if that's actually just what every week is like for normal people- the ones who don't work at home, in fleece pants, cat on their lap, with podcasts to keep them apprised of the outside world.

I've officially declared February 1st to be the launch date of Cocksexual.com, so that's when you'll get to see all the great stuff I've been doing.

As always, I am seeking models, but right now, I am most interested in finding cisgender (non-trans) men to work with in the Bay Area or Seattle.  If you are a cisguy, partnered to one, or know one who might be interested in being pegged on camera, check out my casting page.

A parting shot:

I was aware that a number of his self-righteous feminist pals had a problem with what I do, so I generally stayed away from them, choosing to socialize with my friend one-on-one, when we'd make vegan cookies and watch scifi.  (An associate of his once tried to pick a fight with me inside an upscale restaurant, loudly accusing me in public that I "think it's a good thing to rape children".)

On this particular awkward occasion, I don't recall a certain woman at our table saying anything to me during the meal, nor had she and I ever met before.  I ordered something small, like an appetizer or a milkshake.  When the bill came, I tipped the waitress something like 50% of the cost of what I ate.

The previously-quiet woman gave me the stink eye and snottily said, "You know, for the kind of money you make, you really should be tipping more.  These woman actually have to work for their money."

Remind me that part again about how the left is sexually liberated at right-wingers are my enemy?  I prefer my old-school Republican father who supports my right to sell sexuality over these "enlightened" feminist asses any day of the week.

"Work traditionally provided by women is always made natural and invisible. Everything from knowing how to care for kids and tend a garden to how to hypnotize with fabric and liquid eyeliner is seen as normal, easy and natural for us women — not hard-earned and precious."

-- Juliet November, in Cunt at Rest: On Being A (mostly) Celibate Whore, on bornwhore.wordpress.com

When I started out, I wasn't sure how my father would react when he eventually found out about the porn thing, and I had no immediate plans to tell him.  He has post-it notes on his coffee table to help him figure out how to work his television remote control, so I wasn't worried that my luddite dad was going to stumble across my web site.

A year or two in, a teenaged cousin found my web site.  I'm not sure how this worked in his head, but he apparently decided that there was more satisfaction to be had in tattling on me to the family than there was in not telling the family a story that started out, "I was looking at porn, and..."

So, I got The Call from my father.

"Is this true- that you're naked on some kind of internet sites?"

He sounded a touch angry, but not ragingly so.  I considered whether I should just lie.  I could get away with lying because he had no means of disproving me.

"Yes, it's true."

There was a pause on his end.  Sure, my father always had Playboys not-so-well-hidden around the house, but the idea of men jerking off to his own daughter might be a very different issue.

(It's an interesting test of how screwed people are about sex- the way they react to the idea that I get naked for money.  In general, something I find fascinating about being a sex worker is the way so many people project all their fears, insecurities, and neuroses on me and criticize me for their own issues.  If a person tells me how degrading and disgusting my job is, it's because they view their own sexuality with revulsion.  And this goes for misogynist men as well as the liberal feminists whose eyes - and mouths - shoot jealous hate-daggers at any woman more attractive than them.)

My father posed his next question: "Are you making money doing this?"

"Yes.  People pay a subscription fee every month to see new photos."

He exhaled a massive sigh of relief into the phone. "Oh, THANK GOD, I thought you were doing it for FREE!  Never do that for free."

We both sort of awkwardly laughed about the whole thing.

Later, he let me shoot porn in his beautifully-decorated living room.  Here's a favorite photo of myself from that day, and the one I use on my business card:

(I was prompted to put this story in writing by the Coming Out post on $pread's blog.)

On the porn end of things, I got a lot done.  I shot my first five models for Cocksexual.com, including this lovely lady:

There was much cuteness to be had, as well as hot cocksucking, fucking, drag and gender play, jerking off, and a certain amazing woman who can suck her own dick.  (You'll have to wait until February 2010 to see who!)

I also had a great time at Arse Elektronika.  Here's Annalee Newitz (currently of io9.com fame) presenting her talk on the history and future of love, with potential scenarios for how we might be having relationships 300 years from now.

Thank you to all of the awesome people with whom I had a chance to re-connect or meet for the first time!  It would take me too long to list you all, but know that you're still my beautiful and unique snowflakes (of frozen sexual secretions).

One of the themes of conversation for the weekend was how We (in the most royal and vague sense) would like to live in a world where They accept our kinks, geekery, genders, and modes of sexual expression.  While I was in that frame of mind for the conference, many San Franciscans were spending their Saturday having a daytime rave.  The BART into the city was besieged by young people in their best "freak" outfits comprised of shiny/neon things from American Apparel.  They were there to have fun and play weirdo dress-up for a day, and then go back to being frat boys and Forever 21 clerks or whatever it is that normal young people do.

It was a contrast that highlighted an important social division for me.  Some of us try to de-stigmatize our communities, while others work to stigmatize themselves (in shallow, temporary ways).  It's interesting to observe which subcultures revolve around which approach.

In an industry where a model applications generally just ask which holes you'll put stuff in and if you're willing to fuck a black guy, how many pornographers would even want to receive model applications with so much passion about rethinking gender or the power dynamics of penetration and cocksucking?

I'm glowing!  Sexy, smart perverts!  And they want to work with me!

I feel lucky to get such flattering and wonderful input just two days into the project.  As with when I started my menstruation site, seeing a strong interest from models really reaffirms that I've made the right choice.  It's also exciting that two of my first interested models are active sex workers' rights advocates.  I'm happy to be able to hire people like that so they can keep on being awesome and making the world better for all of us.

A friend of mine thinks I shouldn't paint too cheery a picture of what I do, since it irritates me when outsiders assume my work is easy and always tons of fun.  But during weeks like this, I can't help but be so braggy about how great everything is.

There's also one more porn site I've been wanting to start for a while, and after a lot of thought about what to do with my money, I've decided to take the plunge and go for it.  Ultimately, it's a gamble in a country with its economy in the toilet, but making pornography fulfills me better than other options.  It's a very reassuring and exciting thing to look at my career of the last 7 years and say, "Yes, this is the right path for me.  I want to keep on going further!"

The project?  A pansexual strapon site!  I don't think there's any truly great strapon web content that caters to everyone, and I want to fill that niche.  (With my cock!  Ba-dum-cha!)

Most straight strapon porn is femdom/BDSM/humilation-themed, like Men In Pain - which is hot, of course, but not everyone who likes seeing men get pegged is also into domination and pain.  There's some other hetero strapon porn out there, but it generally has that cheesy mainstream jizz biz vibe that I find decidedly unsexual.  Now, dyke-for-dyke porn, like Crash Pad stuff?  They understand hot fucking with non-biological cocks!

I want to make a site that is enjoyable by all sorts of people- whether you're straight, queer, or in-between.  Enjoyable by people like me.  I just love seeing women with their cocks, and I also love the potential for playing with typical images of masculinity and gender.

I had originally been thinking about how I wanted to find a couple of photographers to shoot photos for the site.  I admit, I'm nothing that special behind the camera, and I was thinking that farming out that part of the job would get both the best shots and save me time.  But, after more thought, I'll actually save money traveling to shoot the photos myself, and I will become a better photographer myself in the process.  (My father once asked me about some other project, in an exasperated tone, "Why do you always have to go about doing everything in the most difficult way possible?!"  Because that's just how I roll, pops.)

I'm slating my tentative launch date for February 2010.  I'll be making visits to 3 different major US cities in November and December to shoot content - DC, New York City, and San Francisco -  so if you're near one of those places and interested, check out the site's casting call page.  I will also be accepting submissions from remote models who are capable of producing high-quality images- so if you're having with a decent camera and want to show me your sexy self, I encourage you to apply as well.

"Not everyone can tilt at windmills, and most dancers just want to make their money with as little fanfare and frustration as possible. My activist entreaty has gone from 'shake the system' to 'get educated, get solvent, get out.' I applaud any woman who attempts to right the wrongs of the adult entertainment business, but I'm not convinced they can entirely be overcome. If a woman can leave the industry with some money, some insight, and some dignity, that's radical enough for me."

-- Lily Burana, in her book, Strip City

I'm considering starting a fourth porn site.  It could take some time for me to earn back my investment if the economy keeps on tanking, so I need to be a good perverted entrepreneur and nail down a figure for the initial outlay before going any further with the project.

I'm a small business, and I currently pay models $100 each per photo set, regardless of whether they are posing nude or having sex.  I prefer to let models choose the level of overt/graphic sexuality they want to display.  For me, it seems the fairest to pay everyone for their time, rather than for specific acts or penetrated orifices.

I'm curious what other small porn companies are paying these days, so I sent an email out to a lot of industry friends asking about pay rates.  One of the responses was that I should be paying more for well-known performers.  While I appreciate my porno comrade's work and her opinion on the matter, the idea of paying some people more than others really makes me bristle, even though I know it's not uncommon.  I've always aimed to be as egalitarian as possible in both my work and personal life, and I will not start paying models different rates based on how well-known they are within a given niche.

It would be an absolute nightmare to try and guess how famous each model is and pay them based on my perception.  How does one determine fame?  Is a certain performer famous enough that I should pay her $300 for a photo set, or $350?  What about someone who's at the top of the foot fetish scene, but a total unknown in the pissing scene?  Is she $200 worth of famous, or $400?

And, "famous" to whom, exactly?  Syd Blakovich is an amazing queer porn star, but when she was at the AVN awards with Madison Young, pretty much no one at the mainstream event had any idea who she was.  On the flip side, I can't name a single Vivid contract girl, so they're not "famous" in my own bubble.  I can't think of a more confusing and unfair way to determine a worker's pay than "fame".

Apart from what I view as unfairness, it seems like a recipe for disaster and potential hurt feelings if my models found out what each of them were being paid and disagreed with my personal assessment of which of them was worth the most.  Transparency has always been a major value to me, whether as a business owner or navigator of my open relationships.

When surfing the alt/indie/queer/artsy porn I mainly enjoy, I usually click over to model pages to see how other businesses go about their recruiting and what they pay.  When I see a company mention nothing about payment, it makes me think one of two things: they pay based on arbitrary/subjective standards like "fame" or "hotness", or they're trying to discourage interest from models for whom getting paid for their work is a top concern.

I'd like to call out my sister/fellow pornographers and ask why so few small porn companies publish their payment rates on their model recruitment pages.  What's the argument for not making it easy for talent to see how much money they would make if they work with you?  If you choose to pay according to more vague standards like fame or hotness, why not be open about that, too, and note something like "$100-300 an hour, at our discretion"?

Over the years, I've seen some alt/indie/queer/artsy pornographers make statements about how they want their models to be in it for the self-expression more than the money, or even that models need to prove themselves with free/low-paying work before getting more or better-paid work.

While I, too, aim to produce porn with models who love what they're doing, I'm not going to pretend that they are completely indifferent to being compensated for their time and sexual energy.  I've seen this from alt/indie/queer/artsy adult companies - the whole "the models should provide my company with free/cheap labor to show how liberated they are" thing - but I've never seen a Horrible Mainstream Porn Company do this.  Feminists throw around complaints about "the Playboy body ideal", but I bet you Playboy doesn't try to make their models think they should just be in it to empower and express themselves.

I will always take issue with the fact that most criticism of the adult industry is about the supposed evils of sexualizing women's sexual parts, and not about boring labor issues like workers being treated well by management or compensated fairly.

Is it too much to dream of a day where discussion about the politics and ethics around sex work is not confined to moralistic fluff issues juxtaposed with imagery of women undulating in darkened rooms?

And is it too much to hope for that we independent and sex-positive porn companies could be among the most transparent in the adult industry about how much we pay our workers?

This was written November 16th, 2003.

Under glass.

Saturday night is the cruelest shift at the peep show, and not just because I'd rather be abusing alcohol at my favorite bowling alley. No, Saturday nights suck because S-Mart attracts throngs of drunken curiousity seekers and couples who think it might be "fun" to go to that giant sex shop downtown.

Now, as you know, I do the dirty stuff in a private booth, away from prying eyes. But when I'm not doing a show, I have to sit in the "den," which is basically a big glass display case in the middle of the fucking store. I'm basically a doll. Anyone who walks in can ogle me in my underwear, tap on the glass, hurl insults, cluck with disapproval at how "exploited" I am, compare me to an animal in a zoo, etc. And they do.

Most nights, this isn't a problem. The usual gang of perverts who frequent the store are used to seeing us in there, and they don't even approach the glass unless they want to buy a show. But on Saturdays, that's when we get the kind of people who aren't used to seeing peep show girls in the flesh.

Worse yet, we get women.

Women shopping for bachelorette parties. Women on "girls' night out," who have had one too many Flirtinis and are feeling self-righteous, hilarious and/or bitter. Women who are with their husbands, and suddenly turn sour when hubby approaches the glass. I stiffen whenever I see a woman coming. They never have anything nice to say, even though I've mastered my sheepish "It's a living, sister" smile.

What made last night especially agonizing was that I was working alone. I brought a book on Buddhism and zoned out on the sofa (so much for mindfulness.) Everytime I slipped out of my book-induced reverie and looked up, there was a group of people standing at the glass. "Hey, she's real!" someone inevitably said. Or (with disgust) "They pay her to sit in there and read?"

I came home at 1:00 a.m. and had nightmares.

"Sex workers may be 'in right' on major purchases and thus well-positioned to weather the storm because they typically pay cash for everything – their homes, cars and household goods. Having no W-2, 1099 gig, sex workers weren't invited to the easy-credit orgy of the last five years.

'My income was somewhat unpredictable and the job had the same kind of limits that modeling and playing sports have in terms of making more when you're younger and then there's the risk of getting arrested, so I was always conservative about my overhead. I just wanted to be in a place where when and if I stopped making $300/hr, I'd still be able to maintain my lifestyle,' explained M, a retired sex worker.

It's almost a biblical reversal – allegorical – the meek shall inherit the earth. Imagine all the sex workers earning six figures buying up forclosures in the right neighborhoods with their ready cash and pristine credit while the corporate bucaneers turn in their bmws and start over."

-- Juliana Piccillo, in Stimulus for your package on julianapiccillo.wordpress.com

I don't make six figures, but I bought my first condo during the recession.  My landlord was kicking me out of my rental house because he bought a posh place on credit and then lost it when his 2-year ARM came up.  My new place is nothing fancy, and I had to get a cosigner- but real estate agents were practically begging me to look at their listings, and I think I got a good deal on the home I ended up choosing.

Sex work exists in the consciousness of almost everyone as the last refuge of the stupid, the lazy, and the desperate. This dismissive viewpoint takes many forms, but the one that often irks me the most is when it's coming from people who express interest in being sex workers.

I get questions (on Myspace, Twitter, and email) all the time from people who want to start their own porn sites.  Most of them including wording such as, "Quick question...", or "If I could have just a few minutes of your time..."

Asking me to explain how to run an independent porn company in such a manner is insulting, and it means you assume that everything I've worked for and learned in the last 7 years can be taught in a couple of sentences.  I basically have a master's degree in making internet porn.  Would you contact an engineer or any other (non-sex) professional and assume they can teach you what they do in a handful of off-hand remarks?

Running a porn site is not a get-rich quick scheme where you click a few buttons on your computer and hundred dollar bills start shooting out of your DVD drive.  It's a job - a skilled job - and it takes plenty of time to get good at it.  You're going to need to pour a lot of energy in it, and it can be quite some time before it's profitable.  You're going to need some capital for investing in equipment and consulting with a local attorney.  You're going to need to learn new skills and hone your existing ones.  Plenty of people fail at operating porn sites - even those who have good content and a love for their work.

Jobs that involve sexuality aren't magical zero-effort high-yield professions, and by assuming they are, you're showing me that you haven't thought this through before contacting me.  It's not that I don't ever dispense helpful advice, but you have to demonstrate that you're not expecting me to try and spoon-feed you information when it's obvious you haven't spent any of your own time researching this new career path for yourself.  If you don't care enough to try and learn about it independently, why should I care about it for you?  And if you're unwilling to take the initiative to seek out information on your own, do you really think you'll be good at running a business?

Perfectly acceptable questions to send me:

"Do you use a content management system?"
"Merchant account or third party billing?"
"Do you encode to multiple video formats?"

Unacceptable questions:

"How do you make a website?"
"Are there any laws or anything I need to know about?"
"How much does a digital camera cost?"

The first set of questions show me that the person has done their own research, and they're looking to fill in the gaps.  They're also not asking me questions that Google could answer for them, which shows that they respect my time.  The second set of questions tells me this person hasn't contemplated the idea of being a pornographer for very long, and probably doesn't know much about the internet or technology in the first place.  (If I reply at all, I tell them to spend at least a hundred hours reading adult webmaster resource sites like YNOT.com before contacting me again.)

Much like the "Sex Workers Are People, Too" PSA, I'd love to see a "Sex Work is Work" PSA.  I think that we're much more accomplished at convincing the world that we're people than we are at getting them to believe that what we do is work.

Whether it's running porn sites, escorting, pro-domming, or phone sex, those of us who are successful at what we do have gotten to that point because of plain old hard work, determination, and smarts.

Just like any other person who's good at their job.

One of the frustrations of being a pornographer are the men (yes, it's always men) who think that in exchange for their subscription fee ($20 for my main site), they are entitled to getting tons of personal attention and for me to cater to all of their fantasies immediately.  Hell, some of them even assume that I will pay to fly to their city so they can have sex with me, for free.  (In almost 7 years of running my own site, no one has ever offered me money for sex.  I have, however, been told by countless men that they would be "willing" to have sex with me in exchange for some form of compensation.  I wonder if other types of sex workers ever get this, or is it just a porn chick thing?)

I often refer to this type of guys as "the projectors".  (Which is also a title I could use for anti-porn/sexuality activists, since the two groups are surprisingly identical.)  The projectors are looking at porn because they're lonely, frustrated, unattractive, and paying for it is the only way they can get any women to be polite to them.  Because they come to porn out of desperation, and often anger at women, they project onto me that I run a porn site because I am painfully lonely, insecure, miserable, and begging to find anyone to tolerate my existence.  I must be just like them!  (Note- these types only make up only a tiny minority of porn viewers, but they can certainly be an annoying minority.)

For $20, they expect you to basically be their internet mistress- and one who they can treat poorly.  Because, obviously, attractive women are so desperate for the chance to make a whole $20 that they would devote massive amounts of time and energy towards the privilege of being able to earn such a magnificent sum of riches.

I hate to break it to them, but $20 is not a lot of money in a country that has running water and electricity.  It's certainly less than one would spend at a strip club, and you couldn't take a girl on a date for that amount.  $20 will barely even buy you a low-end 90-minute porn movie.  For $20 spent with me, you get a month of access to independently-produced porno that will keep you busy masturbating for hours and hours.  (I happen to think that a membership to my site should cost more, but I want keep it competitive and so I continue to charge less than lots of similar amateur-run porn sites.)

Using recent comments from a customer I'll call Captain Dumbass, let's look at the sorts of things these guys have to whine about.

some of us do not have the luxury of being frivolous enough to throw money away on a $180 an hour cam show

People like Captain Dumbass love pointing to the price tag of my cam shows, as though I charge an absurd amount of money for my time, an amount no mere mortal could ever afford to spend on sexual entertainment.  They slot me into the "billionaire bimbo" role to further justify being upset with me.

I charge $3 a minute when I work on my cam network.  The network gets half of that.  Most of my time spent logged in is me waiting around for customers, catching up on blogs or important television shows.  There are plenty of nights where I've spent several hours sitting in front of the computer smiling at the camera and made zero dollars.  But, when people see $180 an hour, they do idiot-math and figure I'm clearing $30,000 a month if it's my full-time job.  Ha!  I have a "good night" on iFriends if I can keep my hourly average above $20 an hour.  That's not even a middle-class annual wage in America.  Hardly the sort of extravagant cash flow Captain Dumbass assumes is had by people like me.

Lots of people look at hourly rates for sex workers and immediately multiply that number by 160 hours to assume what they must make in a month working full-time.  If the escort charges $500 an hour, that's a million dollars tax-free a year(!!!), they figure.  And then they hate us all the more for not only being sexually desirable, but for making what they assume is an insane amount of money.  (Doing, what they consider, is not even "work", anyway.)  People tend to resent anyone who's prettier or more successful than them, and here, sex workers are slighted as both.

What these guys fail to take into account is that sex workers spend plenty of time doing "invisible" work.  That $500-an-hour escort might spend 10 hours in business-running and personal maintenance for every hour she sees clients, which puts her at a middle-class annual salary, not that of a Fortune 500 CEO.  The 3-minute $50 lapdance from a stripper might seem like pretty good money, too- unless you factor in all the time she spends in the gym, the tanning booth, the nail salon, getting her hair done, selecting music, and buying her own props and costumes.  Oh, and if accidents happen to us?  Almost all sex workers are independent contractors without health insurance.  If we're injured and have to take time off to recover, not only do we foot our own medical bills (or go into debt/collections for them), we can't work.

Ummm....ONE facial video in a 7 year span....are you kidding?? If your wondering why your cam show was such a small venue..well..maybe this post will give you some insight as to why this website is not a high traffic area.

Ummm... could it be because I run a softcore nudie site, not a hardcore porn site?  Captain Dumbass might as well fault me for having no centaur fetish content, seeing as how I promised him no centaur fetish content.  I've never understood this complaint.  It's like ordering pizza at a restaurant and then yelling at the waiter for not bringing you sushi.

I love how these guys usually include insults about how my business is be failing because I don't cater to their tastes.  (Even though, of course, I am filthy rich.)  And I have a good amount of traffic, actually - several hundred thousand unique visitors look at my site every month - which is more than many sites like mine.  But thanks for assuming that because you didn't get the facial videos that you weren't promised, my site isn't successful.

Despite this though,you seem to be doing very well for yourself,as you have the means to pick up & travel to Europe & Argentina whenever the urge strikes you.

Oh wait, I'm back in a billionaire bimbo role again.  I have so much extra money, I visit foreign countries "whenever the urge strikes me" - about once a year.  Wow, how fancy-pants-high-fallutin'-big-city-girl is that?  Goes on vacation every year!  Ain't never heard of no one who could afford to do that! (By the way: if you look at what your average American spends every year on their kids - which I don't have - I bet it's significantly more than what I spend on travel.  It's all about how we each choose to budget our money and live our lives.)

That being said,it would be nice if you gave back & shared the wealth a bit,by investing more into your website-as after all,it's people like me that help fund your lavish lifestyle.

"Shared the wealth"?  "Lavish lifestyle"?

Oh, you mean that vault I had built inside my mansion that's filled with shiny gold coins?  Sure, I'll let you have as many as you can grab in one hand.

What am I, some kind of cartoon villain?

I guarantee that if you make a substantial investment in your website and upgrade your videos,take special requests without charging $200,increase your photo sets and the overall content,you'll make a lot more folks happy and you'll have of the internet traffic you could ever want. Adding some more lady friends to your site couldn't hurt either. I suppose this post was a wasted effort on my part,but I thought I would give it a shot.

Oh, now you're offering me helpful business advice?  You want me to be more successful?  And here I thought I was a greedy person who lives in opulence?  These guys who bitch and moan about how $20 a month is too much to spend on my site often couch their anger at me in some kind of half-baked "business advice".  It's hilarious.

And, yes, I charge a minimum of $200 for custom work.  To fulfill your private pornographic fantasy, I'll consider doing it for the bargain price of only 5x what you pay for a generic mass-market porn DVD.  Know any movie-makers who will charge you only 5x the price of a DVD to make a special movie for you?  I'd love a custom Rolland Emmerich film for $75, please.

Speaking of business advice, here's my recommendation to sex workers, as someone who's stayed in my particular business for longer than most: don't ever try to please guys like Captain Dumbass.  Most of your customers and viewers are nice people.  Don't let the 1% of angry dimwits make you think they represent more of your customer base than they really do.  There is never any sense in bargaining or trying to please the cheapskates.  It's actually a good thing to alienate them.  They're not your (long-term) customers, or even capable of polite discussion.

Never try to please the people who have nothing to offer you.  That's what the delete function is for.

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".

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.

"A woman I knew at college — an antiviolence activist, righteous and right-on — used to say, "Testosterone is gasoline, porn the match." I disagree. Testosterone is gasoline — which isn't necessarily a bad thing (gas makes things go) — but sexual frustration is the match.

I'm not suggesting that this tragedy could've been averted if only some selfless woman had "taken one for the team" and married Sodini, an asshole and a sociopath. The women who rejected him obviously saw him for what he was and were right to run in the other direction. But if someone had told Sodini, who hadn't had sex since 1990, to see sex workers — something I advised the guys in my column two weeks ago to consider (among other things) — it might have taken the edge off his anger and kept it from curdling into homicidal rage. Maybe if we, as a society, valued sex workers and sex work, if we legalized and regulated it, and if we viewed "paying for it" as a legitimate option for guys who would otherwise go without for decades, perhaps this tragedy could have been averted.

Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't wish a client as sick as Sodini on any of my sex-worker pals. But if Sodini had started seeing sex workers back in 1991 and not, say, two weeks ago last Monday, perhaps he wouldn't have snapped."

-- Dan Savage, in Gasoline and the Match, in his Savage Love column

The evening also made me reflect on an annoying phrase that gets thrown at sex worker activists: “the happy hooker lobby.”

In the sex work versus trafficking debates, one of the things that happens is that people who focus on trafficking (and specifically on the idea that all people in prostitution are “prostituted” and essentially being raped every day at their jobs) try to derail and discount the perspective of people who identify as sex workers by calling us the “happy hooker lobby.” But here’s the thing: most of the people who use the phrase “sex work” and address the issues in the sex industry from a labor and human rights perspective haven’t had a straight forward “empowering” or uncomplicated experience of the sex work that they’ve done. This much was certainly reflected in the stories told on Thursday night.

It's always been interesting to me - as a part of the "happy hooker lobby", I suppose - how we lobbyists seem to be the ones with the longest lists of grievances about our industries and how things could be improved.  This is because we live it, rather than putting on airs after reading an article on the internet, or having gotten offended/titillated when our crabby women's studies professor told us how degrading she imagines sex work must be.

But, informed critique requires more than theory and self-righteous outrage to even know to complain about things like strip clubs charging stage fees, or escort services taking too large a chunk for too little client screening, or a porn company spitefully reselling a model's images to sites on which she didn't want to appear.  That sort of stuff requires, you know- listening to sex workers.  And learning about how the industries really work.

The people with no stake in a given issue tend to be the ones most prone to moral absolutism.  The less they're invested - the less they're truly interested, even - the more people can project their perfect black-and-white-isms onto the lives of others.  ("Pornography is always exploitative," "no prostitute genuinely consents to the work," etc.)

So, for the ambiguous and fascinating good stuff, I encourage folk to attend (or watch videos from) Sex Worker Literati, the first Thursday of every month in Manhattan.

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.

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.  [Edit: In May of 2010, I got out of an unhealthy, emotionally-abusive relationship].  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?"

At the beginning of June, I spent 10 days in the Bay Area.  I was in town primarily for the 2009 Sex Worker Film Festival, but I also had a chance to go to shoot photos of Roxxie (and vice versa), pick up a new fuck buddy, tour Kink.com, get kissed and spanked by a number of cute boys and girls, and have lunches with famous folks like Dr. Marty Klein, Violet Blue [photo], and Thomas Roche, so it was a well-rounded (and sleep-deprived) adventure.

Of the many events of the festival, I attended Whore-A-Palooza, which included movies and performances in a bar; Sex Work, Trafficking and Labor Migration: Views from Inside The Sex Industry, which featured movies and discussion; Cirque X, a benefit for the St. James Infirmary; and the main event, the Sex Worker Film Festival at The Roxie, which ran all day on Saturday.  (However, in true slut fashion, I didn't make it until the 6pm block of movies because I'd been up past sunrise the night before screwing in a hot tub after the benefit party. Many thanks to Match for supplying me with condoms and lube for said screwing. You're a true sex worker ally, baby.)

The main movie event was a powerful night of hanging out in the Roxie with sex worker activists, allies, and other interested folk. The materials ranged from horribly sad to sweet and funny, and the real standout for me was Carolyn Allain's A Safer Sex Trade.  The 48-minute film covered the lives of three different people in Vancouver, Canada: a middle-aged escort/madam who'd been in the business a long time, a young independent escort with high hourly rates, and a former street worker turned volunteer who delivers free food to women still working outdoors in dangerous parts of the city.  (Read more about the film, view the trailer, or order the DVD here.)

I'm really glad I made a point of traveling for the event, and I look forward to the next one.

If you're looking for a way to contribute to meaningful sex worker projects, I highly recommend donating to San Francisco's St. James Infirmary, which has been facing severe budget cuts this year.

I'll be in the Bay Area next week for the San Francisco Sex Worker Festival. Here's a summary of scheduled events, make sure to check the web site for full details.

* Saturday, May 30: Radar Spectacle Benefit with Michelle Tea and more
* Sunday, May 31: BelleBazaar: An Orgy of Shopping
* Sunday, May 31: SWOP Benefit Party at Diva's
* Monday, June 1: SWOP Roundtable and Hospitality Day
* Tuesday, June 2: Whore-A-Palooza
* Wednesday, Thursday, June 3 & 4: Army of Lovers
* Friday, June 5th: Migration, Sex Work and The Evil Empire: Movies and Discussion
* Friday, June 5th: Cirque X, a St. James Infirmary benefit
* Saturday, June 6th: Movies at The Roxie
* Sunday, June 7th: Intersections: Krip Sex! Krip Sex Work!

For just $40, buy a pass to most of the week's events here.

I'm proud that my company is a sponsor, along with a lot of other great companies and groups.

As surprised as I was that Gary Ridgeway is listed in a guidebook of zany and funny things for tourists, I was also struck by the authors' omission of the fact that his victims were (mostly) sex workers. Is that a good thing- does it reduce the horror of his crimes in the eyes of normal people if he was "just" killing prostitutes? Or is it a bad thing- glossing over an important case in terms of getting international attention focused on the violence against sex workers?

I'm still not sure which part of this perturbs me the most.

Conference organizer Match and I at the porn and brownies party. We're 2 of only 4 people at the conference of 166 who don't call ourselves feminists. Photo by Diva.

Since the weekend in DC, I've been decompressing in a friend's place in Manhattan, objectifying his body and eating the city's most delicious vegan foods.

This year's Sex 2.0 conference had at least 50% growth since last year's event in Atlanta. There were a lot of awesome faces, a sexycute porn shoot, tons of cupcakes, a strong representation of sex worker issues, oodles of intelligent conversations, and very few creepers. On the down side, I barely got to say hello to some people since there was just so much good stuff happening. For a reclusive pervnerd like me, it was overwhelming, but in a positive way. FurryGirl.com has been online for over six years and receives over half a million unique visitors per month, but this was the first time I really felt like anyone has ever heard of me. Even when not wearing my name tag, I had some people do the "O hai, you're Furry Girl, right?" Strangeness.

In my mind, Sex 2.0 2009 kicked off online, with a critical post by previous conference organizer Amber Rhea. Coupled with the many comments, it was a perfect microcosm of why I longer identify as a feminist. It was like playing a game of Cliche Bingo, down to how the commenters (basically) split apart into two camps of opinion: The Feminists and The Sex Workers. (And, of course, it didn't occur to any of the feminists that if the sex workers and a transwoman felt unwelcome by feminists, then maybe the problem wasn't that the sex workers and transwoman were the ones who needed to modify their beliefs.)

There was a pinch of other random bitching and moaning here and there at the conference- complaints that carried as much weight as freaking out about how unfair it is that Wikipedia's entry on your favorite subject is only a stub. While I do plenty of criticizing the world myself, I'm not one to knock a transparently-organized unconference for not reading my mind and creating the panels I wanted to watch. One of my greatest hot buttons is when people complain about that which they have taken absolutely no steps to positively remedy, instead, choosing to pick at people who are doing something.

Moving on- I was a part of two panels. (See the list of the all talks/panels here.) I even wore my Inter-Web Debaters Club shirt so as to solidify my commitment to not fighting too much with people in person. I experienced not one real clash, bless my caustic little heart.

The first panel, Customer Relations for Sex Workers (with Sabrina Morgan, Renegade Evolution, Kimberlee Cline, Monica, Ellie Lumpesse, and David) started in a really solid direction to address issues of safety, how we've changed how we relate to our clients over the years, and a bit about how to screen clients for sex workers who do offline work. The conversation got a bit derailed into a discussion on one's rights when arrested and how to deal with the police, but it only goes to show how many different sex work topics the audience was interested in talking about. A group of us later convened in the hotel bar over champagne to get into a lengthier discussion about the ways in which we stay in touch with clients, the development of genuine friendships, fantasies we feel uncomfortable with (forced feminization and race play were two topics), and an annoyance with sex workers who engage in shit-talking on clients with "weird" fetishes.

The second panel I was a part of, Revisiting Naked on the Internet (with Audacia Ray, Amber Rhea, and Melissa Gira) had me as a bit of the odd-duckling-out. Not being a professional writer or someone who's changed a lot in the two years since the book's release, I didn't have much to give as an update. Dacia turned the conversation to online feminist spaces, where I had to try and not panel-jack by briefly explaining why I no longer identify as a feminist and why the term doesn't mean anything to me any more. (The writer from Feministing.com didn't even jump out of her chair and stab me in the eye with a fork, which was pleasantly surprising.) I told the group, "I was sick of seeing 'feminism' as a euphemism for 'awesome'." Jack hollered out at me, "Are you an awesome-ist?", to which I replied, "I am a militant awesome-ist!" (Thank you, dear Jack, for helping me inject some levity.) One of the other issues brought up in the panel was how profoundly exhausting is is for sex workers (and their allies) to always be on the defensive and doing "101" work. Surprise: We get tired of having to justify our existence to feminists who can't be bothered to educate themselves about our real issues and demands.

All in all, an excellent fucking weekend.

This topic is one of my major headdesk issues with anti-porn crusaders. They say, "porn objectifies women!" as though that's some kind of end-all analysis. I address this topic from two directions.

Firstly, as a porn model and cam girl, it's my job description to "be a sex object", (as the anti-sexers would define it), and it's a job with which I'm very happy. My friendlier customers treat me like a multi-dimensional person, too- but it's not required of them, and I don't resent the ones who don't try and get to know me. (Hell, I know it annoys me when I, as a customer, get an overly chatty waiter or cab driver who tries to impose socializing on me when I'm not feeling up to it.) On cam, my customers pay $3 a minute for the expressed purpose of not having to wine and dine me and pretend to care what I'm saying in order to get me to take off my clothes. It's so much more honest than dating.

I have never met a sex worker who was unaware of that their job entailed before taking it. When asked why she got started, not one replied, "I became a stripper because I was looking for the true love of an intellectual partner who appreciates my inner beauty and doesn't oggle my body." Those types of people answer romance ads on eHarmony.com, not ads in weekly papers for "B/G anal scene $500 cash". It's not as though this whole thing is sprung upon random unsuspecting victims- it's the definition of the work.

"Being objectified" by customers is not something that sex workers themselves are railing against as an injustice they seek to overcome. It's a half-baked analysis being imposed upon our work from outsiders- outsiders who presume to tell the world what we experience and how we feel about it, without ever having asked us. That, in and of itself, should tell you a lot about whether or not it's a real problem.

(Sex workers do, however, regularly rail against being objectified by the media, anti-porn crusaders, anti-sex feminists, clueless academics, women, and others. We work as consensually "objectified" people who are and paid for our work, but we hate being nonconsensually objectified by outsiders who neither pay us nor respect us, and use/abuse us to suit their own agendas and make a profit.)

Secondly, everyone at their job is "objectified" in their roles. I don't profoundly care for the cashier at the grocery store, but no one's ranting online about how he's being oppressed and "objectified" because, at work, most people see him as "a cashier". I don't care to delve into the inner intellectual passions of the woman who made me tea at a cafe, but I'm not aware of any college courses being taught on the "objectification" of baristas. I have never fallen into deep romantic love with a nurse who's weighed me and taken my blood pressure at the doctor's office, but if there are protesters outside the clinic that day, their signs don't read, "Stop the exploitation of women! Planned Parenthood objectifies nurses as mere one-dimensional healthcare workers!"

We can't have a genuine connection with everyone we encounter in our lives, whether they are strippers or bus drivers or sales clerks at a shoe store. To say that "being objectified" as a sex worker is somehow so vastly different than "being objectified" in any other role is telling about the accuser's personal issues with the sex, not the work.

Some people try to "take a step back" and use this as a part of a broader critique of capitalism, but I disagree with that, too. So, under socialism, anarchism, or what-have-you-ism, every human will express heartfelt interest in the well-being of every single human they come into contact with over the course of a day? I find that quite silly.

We all choose how we pick some people as our lovers, some as our friends, some as acquaintances we smile at politely once a week. It's not about economic systems or patriarchy or oppression- it's about time and energy. No one has the time and energy to emotionally/intellectually intertwine themselves in everyone they interact with, and it's ludicrous to think that one should or could.

Whether we choose to not invest ourselves in the janitor or to not invest ourselves in the cam girl, it doesn't matter on an ethical level. One is not inherently a Major Social Problem just because it involves sex.