Red Spine

Where are the T4W and W4T and T4T categories in casual encounters???

GOD! I hate craigslist.

Craigslist now requires phone verification of your account in order to post in erotic services! Nowhere else, just erotic services! Meaning, you have to give your phone number to CL and have them call you and give you a verification code in order to post. So it’s okay to publish photo ads for escort services in local newspapers… but not on craigslist?

Terms of use:

1. We respond promptly to inquiries and requests for assistance from law enforcement officers
2. We give periodic briefings for law enforcement officers on how to efficiently obtain information from craigslist.

A recent google search has led me to understand that this happened at least in part as a result of pressure from the abolitionist organization Love146, which led a boycott against craigslist earlier this year.

Luckily, the phone verification thing extends to ALL service categories, and lots of people are getting pissed. Maybe the legits can call this thing off.

Yeah. Fuck the police, dude.

I rarely remember strip club clients. There are too many people that I speak to in a given night, too many faces, too many men whispering things in my ear. Sometimes an interaction will be special, or particularly fun, or particularly weird, or particularly offensive and I’ll make it into a story to tell my friends or my journal. Every now and then, though, I will have an interaction that, for one reason or another, tears my guts out.

When they look at me like I’m happiness. When they search for my eyes and something clicks. When they go into the black box with women’s lingerie under their clothes and ask me to humiliate them and I refuse and then they cry (I’m femme, and for me, sissification is kind of like scat play- I’m really open to indulging any fantasy with warmth and kindness, but I’m just not going to go there). The space of the strip club makes these interactions hard to come by- too much movement, too much hustling, too much of a party. No space or time for vulnerability. But I’ve lived for them. It’s also those moments that make it difficult not to fall into some too-simple analysis about social fragmentation, the broken lives of a late capitalist economy, listening to endless stories of divorces and career moves begun but then brushed aside because he is, after all, there to relax. To take a break. To get away, to escape the daily grind.

Stripping was so much fun but now I’m bored/annoyed/unwilling to fuck up my knees for the shitty amount of cash I and everyone else in this shitty town has been bringing home ever since either the recession or the grand opening of the 85th club within a ten-mile radius of downtown. I’m sick of inhaling cigarette smoke. Sick, sick of the apple bottom jeans song (okay, maybe not that sick of it…). Sick of, more than anything, beginning the same conversation over and over again over the course of the same night and trying to maintain a constant level of enthusiasm. I haven’t worked in a few weeks. If I could work in a club with a champagne room, you’d best believe I wouldn’t feel this way. But those don’t exist here. No one ever even drinks champagne here.

I want more depth. And more CASH. So I decided to transfer over to the sugar baby/young mistress (in the not necessarily pro-domme sense)/pretending-our-relationship-isn’t-about-money industry.

In the sugar baby industry, you embody your price tag. You inscribe your worth onto your person not only with nice clothing, shoes, tasteful makeup but with gestures, manners, idle talk about travel, carefully planned laughter. I am getting dressed, I am thinking about these things, and I wonder what it is, exactly, that I am capitalizing on.

The john’s desire for a non-pro (just take a cruise on Craigslist, you’ll see what I mean) is, I think, a sign of some fucked-up oppressive shit. They want dirty girls, not whores. They want you intact. But there are kind of two sides to this. First, the desire to evade stigma and the internalized hatred of/disgust with stigmatized persons (whores). It’s all, all about class. Class presentation/classiness is what makes the interaction dirty in a sexy and scandalous way, a socially sanctioned act within the realm of socially condemned actions- a girl in need, not desperate. Non-pro= “not a real whore” = not dirty, no guilt. Second, though, this other weird thing that pops up in lots of places- an intuitive distrust of commercially-based interactions that seems to be a pretty big thing. (”you’re just saying that because…” or, my favorite, “no way, I totally don’t believe you actually just came.” That annoys me. Because I do. In the little black box. Every time.)

I am quelling their fears. I am everything safe. I am a successful college girl, “going somewhere.” I just need some help. What else could I do that would provide me with so much cash and so much time left for studying? I tell him he’s the only one. Of course! He is for now, he probably will be for awhile if he agrees to my proposed “allowance.” I have a class background that has made it easy for me to appropriate a higher class sensibility. I have a wealth of arbitrary knowledge. This is no GFE- it’s a confused version of the real deal in which we must actively deny that a commercial transaction is taking place at all in order to be able to define the value of the interaction (commodity) itself. But dude, I’ve done my homework- believe me, I’m a goddamn pro.

What is being commoditized here? My smile? Because it’s not (only) about fucking (always), and sometimes I think that it is only about fucking insofar as fucking is the easiest way to feel, to imagine intimacy. He spoke to me and I felt the force of his need for another person. It wasn’t pathetic. But it was enormous, profound. He does not know me. I was the blank surface upon which he projected his desires; I felt him making me for himself but at the same time, asking me to give myself away.

Tonight I was talking to my friend who is an escort about the stress of emotional labor. He said, “it’s mostly about being a therapist.” I read somewhere, and I reeeeally regret not being able to cite this but promise I will try later, a rad piece by an escort who said that she felt like her role as casual therapist for clients was taking away tons of $$ from, and totally subverting, the psycho-medical industry. I thought that was fabulous.

Yeah. I don’t know what it is I’m selling.

I came across a post on Savage Minds, one of my favorite blogs (presumably) not written by sex workers (but anthropologists!) linking an LA Times article by Patty Kelly, an anthropologist who has a book coming out on her fieldwork in a Mexican state-run brothel.

I am forever on the lookout for good anthropology on sex industries/ sex work in particular places. I’m not sure where Kelly’s work stands because she has yet to publish it. I’ve got to say that this very short article led me to expect frustration.

There is a little bit of “applied anthropology” here (research that policy makers, etc will actually read, OR, research that attempts to be practical, propose solutions and make recommendations for policy) in what seems to be, from the little I know, the conclusion that state regulation of “prostitution” is in general a “good thing” as opposed to criminalization. Here is where the liberals and the radicals stand on opposite lines and draw their spears.

I’m from the David Graeber/Carol Leigh school of anarchist anthropology of radical sex workers’ rights movements (wanna join? I might be the only one so far). If you’d like a context-specific, more persuasive and generally less polemical argument- well, I’m not going to make one here, but do some research on state-run brothels and state regulation of prostitution in Indonesia in the early 1990s. Not that state regulation always must have terrible, exploitative consequences- Mexico seems like a case in point- but it is not a widely applicable solution to the need for workers’ rights and legal protections. More often than not state regulation is an attempt to stop HIV/AIDS and STIs from spreading to the more “valuable” members of society and their wives and children, not to ensure the health and safety of workers. Mandatory testing does nothing but give johns peace of mind and make workers feel like cattle- sex workers know their bodies and must have the freedom to choose how, when, and by whom they will receive medical care (though medical insurance/free healthcare, obviously, is necessary for these decisions to even be possible). No less important- state involvement dictates where and how one does one’s work!

Kelly does point out the incredibly shitty policies of nations that criminalize prostitution in various ways- Sweden’s 1998 “Protection of Women” act and New Zealand’s 2003 “Prostitution Reform Act,” for example. Yes, clearly, criminalization is bad. Actively prosecuting johns is BAD, and the worst thing for business. The wild anti-sex feminist belief in the inherent victimhood of all “prostituted” women is bad, bad, bad! The refusal to acknowledge that not all workers are “forced” or trafficked is bad! I think that Kelly is in line with my ideas here.

But I think that state regulation constitutes an exploitative force all its own, making workers unable or less able to control the conditions of their own labor. At best, it limits options- as seems to be the case in Mexico. At worst, it leads to unthinkably low wages, shitty working environments and FORCED REGULAR INJECTIONS OF PENICILLIN, as is (was?) the case in Indonesia (see Gail Pheterson’s Vindication of the Rights of Whores for Indonesian sex workers’ perspectives on these conditions).

I’m basically just voicing my frustrations with the gut feeling that there isn’t enough dialogue happening between academics, (badass NEWradical/poststructuralist/third-wave) feminists, sex workers, academic feminists, academic sex workers, feminist sex workers and academic feminist sex workers. Or maybe I’m just lonely.

I’m working on a few very interrelated research projects right now (two academic, one personal/political/community-focused) dealing with, in different ways, sex workers’ rights activism. I’m going to give a little bit of a breakdown of each and I welcome (read: beg for) your comments and feedback. I think I’ll do them in separate posts.

In order to strengthen and think through some possibilities for the city-wide sex workers’ outreach coalition I’m a part of, I’m doing some research into how other similar groups and more formal organizations and non-profits have gotten their shit together. Most specifically, I’m interested in forming some sort of group or network of support for sex working (or formerly sex working) survivors of sexual assault, abuse, dv, etc. The assumption would not be that the trauma a person has gone through is necessarily in any way connected to their work- the point of being sex-worker-specific would be to address some of the difficulties workers may face in looking for support in other places, from people and organizations that might not be familiar with the sex industry, may have fucked up ideas about it and about workers, or maybe just may not be able to relate very well to the experiences of workers.

I’m thinking that in its initial stages this project could begin online- I don’t really know what that could look like, and I’m not very tech-savvy, but I’m sure I can find people to work with who are. A great example of a similar project for survivors is Pandora’s Aquarium.

An amazing in-the-three-dimensional-world group and support network of women of color survivors (also worker-oriented) is UBUNTU!, formed after the Duke tragedy.

Does anyone know of other similar groups, resources, etc?

I was a bit put off by Susannah Breslin’s interview with Josephine of “This Stripper Hates You,” probably more because Susannah Breslin did the interview than because of any problem I had with what Josephine had to say. I really dig the “Letter from Johns” project (see my blogroll) but am not about to disagree with the charges of voyeurism some have put against Breslin (can’t find the link, sorry). As in- she’s a sex writer obsessed with sex work, not a sex worker herself. And there are a million sex workers with blogs, so what’s the (ethical) deal with “Letters from Working Girls?” I don’t really feel like getting into it. Anyway, Panther in Pumps wrote a response to the interview and Josephine’s and others’ replies to the post are really interesting- check it out.

The discussion made me think a lot about how sex work is a form of emotional labor. I had a short conversation about this with a friend last night; it’s important to remember that stripping is a service job, and that in the service industry you are required to smile when you don’t want to smile and damn, can that suck sometimes. I say that’s “important to remember” with non-workers in mind, and in particular people that have the tendency to jump on any complaint a worker might have and take it as an opportunity to explain to them the conditions of their degradation.

Never have I felt so exploited and degraded and powerless as when I worked in a small locally-owned cafe as a teenager. I was payed shit, sexually harassed by the manager, and treated like a vending machine by the soccer moms. Food service. No one ever gave me a hundred dollar bill in food service.

It’s pretty much my opinion that anyone that doesn’t own and own the rights to their (own) labor is in a basically exploitative situation. In this late capitalist economy, that definition of labor exploitation includes a lot of people.

There is something about the strip club industry, though. Tip-outs are one thing; stage fees another. How fucked up is it that you, the human embodiment of the sexy silhouette on the neon sign outside the door, are required to pay your employer for your opportunity to work?? What have dancers’ rights efforts looked like since the days of the unionization of the Lusty Lady? Where are those conversations happening? I remember a really great article in $pread awhile back about some really amazing law suits going down in California…

One of the reasons why I went back to my first club, to reference my last post, is because I’m treated well there. Being treated well means more than not being “taken advantage of” in certain obviously recognizable ways; it means being treated like an adult. It means not having to flirt with the bouncer. It means avoiding conversations like the Katherine Frank describes in the preface to her awesome book, G-Strings and Sympathy. It means not entering into a creepy, condescending and paternalistic relationship with your employer- more or less simply, the right to NOT be called “sweetheart” and have your concerns ignored.

But I also think that it is important to have rights as a worker, not as an IC. If I pay you stage fees, please explain to me why I can’t have health insurance? It’s not that simple. Health insurance, anyway- yeah, really not that simple. But there are gains to be made. I like stripping. I like working for nice club owners. But I would, in an ideal universe, work in a union-owned-and-operated club.

This points to one of my criticisms of projects like Breslin’s “Letters from Working Girls” blog (sort of), or any stupid academic project that focused on the dancers (or any other sex workers) in a way that totally obscured either the roles/participation of clients and/or the larger political economic context of their working conditions. The politics/morality of GETTING NAKED is a pretty exhausted topic of feminist research (as is the “they’re doing this because they have no options” thesis). How about the circulation of cash? Recognizing the complexity of those transactions, and interrogating some assumptions about what sort of work is exploitative and in which contexts. There is no “strip club industrial complex.” Sometimes male club owners can be great to work for and female owners can suck. Sometimes workers couldn’t give a fuck about workers’ rights and the rest of us need to deal with that, to think about it as a valid position. Though there is a lot of overlap, we come to different types of sex work from different places, in order to meet different needs and goals.

This is getting sort of disorganized, and I don’t really know what it is I’m calling for. Just some thoughts. One more thing, though. There’s this book I’ve been reading about sex workers in the DR. The author talks a lot about how these women that do sex work in a tourist town do it as a means to “advancement,” meaning that it’s a better option than other ways of making money that would provide them with much less for themselves and their families. I think that’s a good framework for thinking about any form of sex work. For some people, it’s a means of survival. So having sex for trade is better than not surviving. For some people, it beats working at the university library, cataloging books all afternoon for $8/hr. For some others, being a famous porn star is way cooler than being a not-famous bank teller or attorney or kindergarten teacher.

I have an extreme love/hate relationship with my old/current club. Friday night was so amazing, but at 1am on Saturday I was sitting in the dressing room eating a taco and wondering what the hell I was doing there, listening to the sound of eight obnoxious high school seniors with no money cheer and yell for a dancer who, in my opinion, should not have been in some boy’s lap during her stage time. Which is an interesting thing for me to say, given my first post on “right conduct”/name calling. There is a lot going on here.

A recent court case set a new legal precedent in my state regarding the degree of contact allowed between workers and customers in ambiguous-forms-of-sex-selling-establishments that don’t serve alcohol, and now super nice 18-year-old strippers are doing for free what they should be getting hard cash for. Crawling offstage to give someone sitting at the rack a lap dance when he’s thrown down anything less than $20 (minimum) is a DUMB idea. You are decreasing your chances of selling more dances and you are lowering the club standard. I mentioned this to a girl and she said, Wow! That’s good advice! I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but I really hope that she takes it.

Anyway, I went back to this club primarily because I love the owner and manager, Carrie, and also because I wanted to do private shows in an environment in which I felt safe and comfortable. Carrie is the sweetest badass ever. She waives fees on slow nights and says things like “I just want you to be happy.” On numerous occasions when a customer’s hand began to wander too far up my thigh, Carrie has been there banging on the door in an instant and yelling “NO TOUCHING!” She watches the cameras, hands out Red Bulls, and counts out singles all at once like she has three arms and six eyes. She threatened to call the police on a horrible-smelling drunk guy that called me a “stupid crack head” for saying to him, “uh, no… I’m not going to suck your dick.” (Carrie, unlike myself, has some real moral beef with sucking dick for money. I don’t, but I wouldn’t recommend trying it in her club regardless.) Besides the management, I also have some really sweet memories of the camaraderie I felt when I first came to work there. I formed some really great friendships, and a vast majority of the girls at the time were around my age and experience level. When I left and began working at more established clubs, I realized all of the mentorship and instruction I had been missing. I grew and learned a lot immediately upon leaving, but at the time it was really comfortable and ultimately a good place to begin.

The Downsides: 18+ admission means hustling, not just for one-song table (or now, lap) dances but for shows. A good number of guys don’t come in for shows and don’t know what they’re about. A good number of guys are under 21 and, even if they do have some money, they are annoying and try to be my friend and are positively boring- no bizarre fetishes, no begging to lick my feet, no extensive and creative dirty-talk. Hustling these men for shows is a fucking pain and usually doesn’t work. So I sell them a one-song dance, and even that’s hard- because the club serves no alcohol, it relies on cover fees and cuts from our dances and shows, which drives up the price of a one-song private dance 50-100% of the alcohol-serving clubs’ average.

It’s definitely not all bad, though it can often be frustrating. I MISS THE POLE- this place doesn’t have one. And I just don’t like hustling. I’ve learned how to do it well, but it took a long time and it really zaps my energy. I’ve learned to push hard and pull back; to corner a man for just a second and whisper “I… would really love to dance for you. I’m ready,” then sit back and smile sweetly. I’ve learned to play young, to mix giddy and bubbly with showing that I’m smart (when it’s to my advantage). I’ve learned anger management, and when it’s worth it to openly insult a customer for being a fucking asshole. I’ve learned to spot a wedding ring (or an untanned band around the ring finger) from across the room, because solitary and well-dressed married men are a SURE BET. But my ideal $$$making fantasy is a line of communicative, nice but not too attractive men with dirty fantasies and fat wallets who shower regularly, just waiting patiently for their turns. I guess I’m just saying that I don’t like having to work too hard. Middle-aged and older men, unattractive or not-super-attractive men, a lot of married men, etc. etc. are great customers because they know that, walking into a strip club/whatever, they are purchasing a fantasy. They are buying a service: my attention. They don’t assume, like a lot of younger and (to shamelessly generalize) more attractive, or overly (and often undeservedly) confident men that I should just give it to them for free. They never are the ones that say stupid shit like, “I really wish I had met you at a regular bar instead.”

High points of my weekend included: getting lessons in Korean, German, and Spanish (”Lo siento, pero no puedo vender sexo”), having a drunk guy ask me to get the money out of his pocket and then not asking me to count it, one really fun and profitable show with a guy that said he’d come back the next night but didn’t (meh), trying to convince some guy that Islam is NOT “an inherently oppressive and misogynistic religion.”

Low points included: the hustle, a guy puking, the good show guy not showing the next night like he said he would to give me a million dollars in hundred dollar bill$, and a general lack of sufficient appreciation for how awesome, funny and creative a performer I am (i.e. little enthusiasm for Gravy Train’s “You Made Me Gay” and my AMAZING new sunglasses). Ah, well.

I can never stay in one place for too long; I’ll see how next weekend goes.

This afternoon I got a tiny bit drunk with my friends, lying on the grass in the sunshine. Then I walked away and looked at my missed calls, saw RESTRICTED repeated three times, and freaked out.

I haven’t danced in six months, but I’m going back this week. I always knew that my break was temporary but I had gained 7 pounds and hacked my hair off and had been feeling generally down on six-inch heels- it wasn’t until a combined sudden urge to stay up late dancing around to Lil Mama AND the sudden desperate need to buy a few plane tickets struck that I decided to wander into the doors of the first club I’d ever worked in, at the tender age of barely 19, and ask for a job again. The owner of this club is positively rad and she always liked me a lot, and I was happy and not particularly surprised to see how well she remembered me. It’s been almost two years. We chatted for awhile. Then she gave me Friday and Saturday night until close without a single mid-day or mid-week shift to worry about.

This club is pretty sketch, and I love it. I love having the opportunity to do private shows- I find those interactions so much easier to navigate, so much more straight-forward than stage dancing, even though I probably enjoy stage dancing more (but sort of in the same way that I really like doing pilates and having pillow fights). It’s dirty-talk, not aimless flirtation. There’s more room for creativity. When guys at my stage start to try to talk dirty to me I can point to the black doors in back and politely let them know that NO you can’t touch my pussy but you can talk about how you’d like to, over there, for about a million dollars an hour. Usually, if they’re horny enough, they say YES! But if they say no I tell them to please have some fucking manners. Sometimes I feel like a human television screen, but then I remember that I am much more expensive than a rented porno and if the guy staring at me and getting off doesn’t realize the difference then really, it’s his big financial loss.

When I first started working at this club I was obviously a little less experienced and completely unaware of how to set my own boundaries. This is something I plan on posting about a lot in the future because it’s something I really want to put some serious work into- how to check my own head, do a little self-assessment, find out how to work with how I’m feeling that day and what I need to do to keep myself safe and happy. These are skills that I did not have. That’s okay, because they’re skills that everyone has got to learn. But what the fuck am I saying here- that sometimes we need to undergo harm and trauma to be “taught a lesson?”

About my restricted missed call. I met this guy at that club who was a smiling, manipulative, fast-talking assailant. He was a rich asshole who threw twenty dollar bills on my stage like singles, offered me things and had fabulous friends, and I wanted to be fabulous and make tons of money being pretty and fabulous and having good hair and he said to me once, “You know, your job is to meet men like me.” Red flag, right? The story has a shitty ending. I knew something fucked up had happened, so I told him that I didn’t want to hang out with him and his coked-out friends who never even paid me for one stupid local ad that I did in their stupid fashion-art magazine EVER AGAIN. He kept calling, and emailed, and said in a perfectly practiced casual tone, “Why are you being so crazy? I just wanted to call and say hi…” Delete, delete, delete. But I felt so stupid about the whole thing- and he made me feel so crazy for feeling so terrible and hurt and sick about it- that I didn’t call it coerced sex, non-consensual sex, rape until over a year later when I did a basic training program for a local women’s crisis hotline and realized, shit- I am so not over that. I thought that I was just a dumb, naive girl. A dumb, naive girl that has never known (as evidenced by a handful of fucked-up sexual encounters I had as a teenager, and one blacked-out-drunk rape) how to say no, has never known how to assert her boundaries, has always derived her sense of self-worth from knowing that there are indeed people out there that want to fuck her. My feminist socialization began the moment my mom said her first words to me and still, these are the things I was thinking.

So, in talking now about how I need to do this sort of “check my head,” boundary-setting work, I am sort of conflicted. Because part of me feels too pissed off to “learn from my bad experiences.” I know that I need to spend some more time sitting with my bad feelings and feeling righteous about them, allowing myself to be angry and to see where and how I was hurt (because it took awhile for me to even realize that the incident had a serious effect on me at all). But I also know that people aren’t divisible into discreet categories of harmful and safe; that I need to stop blaming myself for being a “dumb girl,” that I need to recognize how fucking shitty and hateful and abusive and victim-blaming it is to call myself a “dumb girl” for having “gotten myself into that kind of situation” because if I do I am, by default, extending the violence of that judgment to others. At the same time, I’m probably never going to take the phone number of a customer again.

I don’t know if my restricted call was this same guy. The last I heard from him was when I (stupidly) picked up a restricted call over my last winter break as I stood putting on my coat in my grandmother’s foyer. He said my name, and I just hung up. He’s moved away. But now, having started to deal with it all, he’s sort of come to dominate my memory of my first club. I wonder what it will be like to go back, feeling so different- like I’ve grown so much in just a couple of years.

I found this really great collection of femdom fashion ads on flikr… I think I found it linked on Susannah Breslin’s blog. It made me happy, because I am the sort of person that buys fashion magazines just for the ads…

I really liked the D&G nonsense space-agey type ads from last summer, too, with the same sort of scene: clothed and fierce-looking women, naked and vulnerable men.

This blog will get serious… tomorrow.

A recent post by Calico on “Eight ways to revolutionize the sex industry” reminds me of a piece by Mirha-Soleil Ross called “Dear John” in Annie Oakley’s anthology Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry. She writes…

Anti-sex work feminism “has only had an impact on my sweetest clients, making them feel guilty. And it’s made me have to spend extra time playing political therapist, having to reassure them that no, they are not hurting my sense of self… that if i feel exploited at $150 an hour I need a serious reality check and that yes, they should continue seeing me ’cause otherwise I’ll be stuck with only stinky assholes to sleep with as clients.”

I was reading the piece last night. I bought the anthology at the Sex Workers’ Art Show (which I know everyone reading this either attended or really wanted to attend, because it was really amazing). You can buy it on the internetz! Anyway, I think that shifting the focus to the consumer in discussions of “experiencing sex work” is really important when you’re engaging with people who aren’t workers and/or aren’t allies. To deny that the reasons why people pay for sex (etc.) are complex and varied is to assume that the same menacing drive to do violence, conquer, and objectify is the dark force motivating anyone’s decision to hang out at a strip club, masturbate with a stripper in a little dark closet, call up an escort or pro dom, or… whatever. Consumers of sex aren’t all unhappy, desperate, misogynistic, fucked-up assholes or men. And- the anonymity of the john/client/customer, the privacy of the exchange and the secrecy of the transaction (…relative and depending…) not only tells consumers of sex work that they don’t need to worry about being held accountable for the ways in which they act towards and think about workers, it also (as Ross writes) makes people feel like shit for just trying to feel good about getting some.