The ugly stuff…maybe I’m being too generous towards myself and the reasons they wouldn’t publish it was because it was banal? I did hear “this is too depressing” I can’t remember which thing I took out after that feedback from a publisher via my agent. Then at another point my agent said “can we cut back on the crying? Seems like you’re crying in every chapter right now, what the eff!”

So that was the book thing – unless it’s like salacious-ugliness (somebody famous reveals abuse/horror, like Linda Lovelace in ORDEAL), publishers want the arc to generally be more uplift than debbie downer.

But as far as ugliness that *happened* (versus why it did or didn’t get published) – I’m guessing there’s a commonality of sorts throughout the industry? Maybe similar to how what was shitty for me as a waitress at Marie Callendars was what would be shitty for anyone waiting on the public, even though the particular restaurant I worked in had specific awfulness (I had a glass of dirty water thrown in my face for asking one of the assistant managers not to tell obscene “jokes” in front of me for one example).

I mean, at the base of all the ugliness is the same thing – male clients dehumanizing me. Whether it be coercing acts I had not consented to, stealing money from me by hugely under-paying back in my cringe-worthy naive days of taking someone’s word for it when he said “I just want to play for as long as we want, and I’ll pay you at the end” (meaning “I don’t know how long we’ll play for so I won’t know how much to pay you until the end,” when in fact he knew all along he intended to pay me for one fucking hour, period), having horrible hygiene while expecting me to get within 10 feet of them…just, all the ways a male can convey: I matter, you don’t – not here, and not anywhere. I’m the kind of irritating radical feminist who thinks that is inherent to the sex industry – inherent in the perfunctory access to some women’s bodies at all times that males are currently guaranteed, via both consensual and non-consensual parts of the sex industry. I think the “I matter, you don’t” thing is inherent to white male supremacy everywhere, all the time. You just don’t see a lot of movies or memoirs about how quirky or romantic or glamorous it can be to service humans who have more power than you in any other way except the way females serve males in the sex industry. It seems to be the only such set-up that has the nerve to bill itself as harmless fun.

As for your friend – I feel like the bottom line is – nobody has good enough instincts to prevent misogyny, basically. It’s like – self defense is a great skill, but it doesn’t make *men* less dangerous towards women, or less hateful, nor can it ever protect infallibly. But if you or your friend ever want to talk specifics that you think might be more helpful, my email door is always open. joandotkellyatsbcglobaldotnet. For anything.

Um, I feel like I should tell you this since we’re having a friendly exchange now – sorry for the awkwardness of it – I got mad when I read your reaction to the movie “The Girlfriend Experience” and I expressed that anger in a post at my place. It was many days ago, but I thought, what if she goes to my blog and sees that and then thinks I’ve really been like “eff her” this whole time, instead of there being a, uh, timeline, and, uh, some earlier hot-headedness. Anyhoo, there you have it.

agreed about first person writing being potential entertainment and that being a value in its own right. I still have weird feelings about my relationship to all of that. To be honest, I think I am one of the only truly sex-negative people I know. In that it’s never de-politicized for me, it’s not possible for me to sexually (or in any other way but somehow I’m obsessed with the sex part) interact with anyone outside a framework that already troubles me. White male supremacy is what we’re in, and though I do believe in resistance, I won’t be able to ever undo mine or anyone else’s induction into it, and the effects that has. Plus most people don’t see problems where I do, so that puts me at odds too, hence the sex negativeness.

There are some pretty easy laughs to get if you’re a physically-mostly-graceless, at-times-emotionally-awkward person like me, having clumsy sex, especially in kink. I don’t mean that like “oh my god I’m an ugly duckling please everybody reassure me,” I just mean I never have had that everything-goes-smoothly-and-I-look-”sexy”/graceful-doing-it pizzazz when up against other people’s bodies.

So the crabapple knee jerk feminist in me is like, okay, I can understand why I might think “this could be funny to write about” but outside of instances of sarcasm, I’m not a social-critic type of humor-having person. I mean I’m not someone who does political satire in any way. When I’m joking around about personal sex stuff, I’m establishing a baseline that I don’t even agree with myself – that the only thing imperfect in that given snapshot is how smoothly it didn’t go, tee hee.

At the same time – my sister’s a stand up comic, and going to shows with her, seeing her and her friends do their sets, I could never fawn enough over them to express the full extent of how honestly – corny, sorry but true – healing/restorative it was for me to just get to laugh that fucking hard. and none of them were radical feminists, hello.

I think it’s that, I feel like there’s this weird thing around people who write openly about their own sex stuff, where some kind of authority is almost automatically granted them, and words in written form are given so much weight by a lot of people to begin with. Like, hey now I’m a “sexpert” because I gabbed about spanking and selective dick sucking. Instead of reality being its own kind of authority, being acknowledged *as* reality, rather than distorted and spun for personal gain.

Reality is I had a lot of super ugly, soul-crushing experiences doing full time pro kink. But was not able to get a publisher until I cut most of that shit out of the book. And now that book is looked at (not so much by others in the pro kink world, ha, but very often by “outsiders” to kink) as an authoritative account of pro subbing. And an entertaining one, so I’m told. And it’s not a book I would write today, not jokes I would make today.

That may make me a dud in some people’s books, but that book’s very existence makes me a liar, retroactively, in a sense. How’m I supposed to balance the fact that I do think almost everything is worth joking about, that people laughing about stuff with each other has value, but there is rarely room to simultaneously respect the whole, the reality of everything? And that even though I know there’s a difference between me focusing on lighter-hearted stuff and someone else perhaps intentionally obscuring harms done out of a vested interest in their continuance, the effect is the same? It goes unseen/unremarked upon.

I realized belatedly that there’s a third option besides my (a) vanity and (b) edification/stereotype reduction above, and that’s entertainment/reading enjoyment. I enjoyed your book, for example. I’m certainly not one to talk about writing in the (b) category — much of my writing about stripping comes from just my own lens and is more about storytelling, capturing some dynamics about customers that I found interesting, and probably some vanity too.

I agree that being one example of stereotypes of sex workers not being applicable doesn’t tend to help much to eradicate the stereotypes. People usually just slot you into a box of “well you’re not [stereotype] because you’re — [pick it, typically something about background or education].” And yeah, being in the position of selling sex or sex-related actions like lapdances puts one into a category where one can be the basis of assumptions no matter what ones resume looks like. But often getting paid depends on going along with those assumptions, depending on the payor.

I agree that dispelling stereotypes is useful from a sex worker advocacy perspective. But also that much of that’s a waste of time. As long as women, percentagewise, derive more income from being visual (and that includes marrying “up” income-wise or employment-wise from any starting level, as well as sex work), the stereotypes will be there. My interest is more in advocating that women and men have equal economic power. To me that is the *only* way that the stereotypes go away, no matter how many drug-free Ivy League strippers are out there.

“I don’t know what to do about the fact that sometimes it bugs me when I see what looks like self-servingness that erases some parts of reality in harmful ways, when in fact I have done the same thing.”

Oh, but you haven’t. Your book and your blogging doesn’t pretend to wash away all the negativity, doesn’t dress it all up as “pure” and “clean.” You’re out to tell your story, to entertain the reader, to speak your truth. Nobody goes in with the illusion that you’re out to explain away the dark side, using yourself as the shining example rather than one woman telling her story.

Which differentiates your writing from the OP, IMO. The OP and Part II use expressions like: “I don’t think that our working relationships as sex workers [with pimps] are more likely to be abusive than anyone else’s relationships” and heroin is “pure clean fun.” This isn’t telling a story, it’s an attempt to persuade, without perspective.

I don’t disagree that criminalization protects pimps. Also, I’m sorry if my other comment sounded like I was implying you’re in a battered wife situation, like doubting your non-hostage-ness, or anyone else’s. what I meant was that I felt like you were trying to say “this is what a pimp REALLY is, even though a small percent may be dicks like the stereotypes.” And it’s not from TV or movies that I get my hostility towards pimps.

Maybe it’s such an emotional thing for me that it was really hard for me to take it as anything other than pimp-defending. When maybe all you were actually saying was – it’s not fair that people who are not harming women are also subject to legal prosecutions and punishments exactly like people who are harming women. To me, though, that argument is not – “well this is who pimps really are, so people should re-think pimps,” that argument is “these people are not pimps, and it’s not fair that the law characterizes them as such.”

Lastly – I think we’re on the same page about alcohol. Heroin, probably not so much, but such is life.

Which is – I think what you say here:

“it would be a vanity exercise and a major waste of time for anyone looking for nuance”

applies actually somewhat fairly to both the book I wrote and some of the blogging I do at my own site. And I don’t mean that self-deprecatingly (I’m not really the one to bash vanity, ahem), I just think it’s an objective truth. Which makes my feelings about another thing I wanted to respond to in your comment, I don’t know, weird? Contradictory? Unfair, given my circumstances?

Hello muddled-ness. What I mean is:

I think I have a different take on harmful stereotyping of women in the sex industry. Which is to say, I find it harmful that men hate women and feel entitlted to our bodies. The stereotypes about women in the sex industry – that we’re all on drugs, all in it against our wills, or at any rate are too damaged to right-minded-ly choose it freely – my experience is that even when people realize/d all those things are not true about me, it did not make them stop thinking of me as a whore, or stop thinking “whore” is a bad thing. And it surely did not stop any males from hating me or feeling entitled to my body or any other woman’s.

I think that my view of the sex industry is radical feminist-oriented (that the harms are systemic and universal to class-female, no matter if some individual females have it better or worse) and that this differs from sex worker advocacy (which I understand [maybe misunderstand though?] to be about addressing individual circumstances – which ways is it bad for which of us, and what do we do about each thing to make it better for those of us who could benefit?)

So I think dispelling stereotypes is indeed useful from a sex worker advocacy perspective. But since it’s one I don’t share, I notice that I have the emotional respose of “what the eff, waste of time.”

And partly that’s a problem because it’s dismissive – I’d like to be able to see things differently from someone without dismissing her, and I haven’t always cared about that, let alone succeeded at it, in the blog world. I try not to be a dick in that way anymore but christ knows I falter still.

And partly also why it’s a problem is the aforementioned, muddled reference on my part to unfairness –

If dispelling stereotypes was an endeavor that never got air time, well, obviously I would not have had a book published. That very thing – hey look it’s an educated, sober, white middle class, got-into-it-when-she-was-older person, whoring it up for fun and (okay technically no)profit(but still)! – is the only reason it was considered edgy and attention-grabby enough to sell.

And I say that as someone who has some arrogance about my writing skills. An equally or better written book by someone who fit any of the negative stereotypes – from sympathetic to despised – would not have gotten published.

I’m not sure if my comment now has turned into a one-person circle-jerk, help. I don’t know what to do about the fact that sometimes it bugs me when I see what looks like self-servingness that erases some parts of reality in harmful ways, when in fact I have done the same thing.

I think to be effective, a post trying to do (b) has to be realistic about where the stereotypes come from and whether there is any truth to them, and also look at whether the degree to which they apply has to do with privilege. If the conclusion is that there’s some statistical accuracy there, but it’s still not appropriate to second-guess the individual’s decision, then I think it’s important to make the differentiation between individuals (eg, sex workers’ rights) and an industry or situation at large (eg, the sex industry or the drug industry).

Otherwise it winds up being a mixed up discussion that loses the forest within the trees. eg, if I were going to do a post about stripping, using my personal situation as a guide, it would be a vanity exercise and a major waste of time for anyone looking for nuance. A few people who wanted to hear a certain verdict or get a hands-on feel for the industry (albeit thru a very limited lens) might find it “validating and challenging.” That’s kind of the concern I have with the OP.