I am a sex worker and I make my money from clients seeing me. Some clients just happen to have a disability. – Rachel Wotton
When Someone You Love is A Sex Worker
Do you have a sex worker in your family, or are you in a relationship with one? If so, Stacey Swimme of SWOP would like to talk to you. She’s writing a book called When Someone You Love is A Sex Worker, which is intended to support family members and partners, and she recently sent out an email to ask for input:
…I am inviting family members, partners, lovers and friends of sex workers to be interviewed for my book. I’m looking for examples of challenges as well as successes. I want to hear about your fears, disagreements and compromises with the sex worker(s) in your life. It would be a privilege to include your perspective if you have time to do a short interview (about 15-30 minutes) on one of the four dates below. You do not have to provide any identifying information. You’re welcome to provide a fake name…
The four dates are Wednesday November 14th (at 11AM, 11:40AM, 12:30PM and 1:15PM), Wednesday November 21st (same time slots), Monday November 26th (at 9AM, 9:40AM, 10:30AM and 11:15AM) and Tuesday November 27th (same time slots). If you’re interested please email StaceySwimme@gmail.com with your preferred name, age, city and times from the list that work for you.
Updates
…farmers are losing thousands of shillings to prostitutes in [Kenya]… social services chairperson Elizabeth Kibii…said the department has received many complaints from farmers who have been robbed… “They either lace the drink with drugs that will make you unconscious or they send one of their own to the room early and hide under the bed. And when he and her partner are busy, the one under the bed walks away secretly with the money”…
Australian whore and activist Grace Bellavue uses the intense story of how she came out to her parents as a springboard for a discussion of whore stigma, in which she convincingly argues that those who oppose prostitution should actually be fighting that stigma rather than perpetuating it. It’s powerful and well worth a read, but skip the comment thread.
This sort of story is only “shocking” to the psychologically and sexually illiterate:
An ordained counselor dedicated to “freeing” people from homosexuality has been arrested on charges of molesting…young men…Rev. Ryan J. Muelhauser …was connected with OutPost Ministry…[and] allegedly fondled two young men who were seeking to “cure” themselves of homosexuality, as well as asking them to masturbate for him…
Furthermore, “leading a crusade” against any form of sexual behavior should be considered probable cause for suspicion of practicing that behavior:
A former top [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] official who helped lead the [South Florida] crusade against child sexual exploitation was sentenced…on a child pornography charge. Anthony V. Mangione…possessed up to 150 images of child pornography, some depicting the “extreme abuse of children”…
Neofeminist fanatics who foam at the mouth about “rape culture”, insist that normal economic needs constitute “coercion” and pretend that compliments are a form of “violence against women” need to have stories like this one drilled into their brains:
Mah Gul, 20, was beheaded after her mother-in-law attempted to make her sleep with a man in her house in [Afghanistan]…Gul was married to her husband four months ago and her mother-in-law had tried to force her into prostitution several times in the past…The suspect, Najibullah…said the mother-in-law lured him into killing Gul by telling him that she was a prostitute…
That is what sexual coercion, forced prostitution and violence against women actually look like.
Aspasia writes in her own blog on would-be allies and “concerned parties” who expect sex worker activists to spoon-feed them the way prohibitionists do, and why it’s a bad idea to cater to their demands.
Dean Boland, the lawyer who was fined $300,000 for demonstrating the absurdity of America’s draconian “child pornography” laws, has lost his appeal; the judges ruled that there really is such a thing as sympathetic magic, so that altering the images of children actually and literally harmed them in some tangible way. So much for science, logic or common sense.
Another “dog bites man” study:
…a group of boys ages 8 to 11 whose fetal testosterone had been measured from amniotic fluid when their mothers were 13-20 weeks pregnant…were shown pictures of negative (fearful), positive (happy), neutral, or scrambled faces while a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine tracked changes in their brain activity. In the boys who had higher levels of fetal testosterone, the brain’s reward system was more responsive to positive…facial cues…[suggesting] those boys have a greater proclivity for “approach-related behaviors,” such as fun-seeking and impulsivity…
The US government’s scheme to collect and indefinitely retain DNA from virtually anyone has been challenged a number of times since it was first slipped into the Trojan Horse Act of 2005, and the Supreme Court has finally deigned to rule on it: “…at least 21 states and the federal government have regulations requiring suspects to give a DNA sample upon arrest…[which is then] cataloged in state and federal crime-fighting databases…the justices opted to take on an April decision…from Maryland’s top court, which said it was a breach of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure to take, without warrants, DNA samples from suspects who have not been convicted…”
The “sex robot” morons are at it again:
Could sex with robots help extend human life spans? Some futurists seem to think so. A Nov. 7 article on the futurist website Transhumanity argues that robot lovers could help extend life spans by giving users mind-blowing “longevity orgasms” far superior in quality to those from human…partners…”[Sexbots will] be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag competition, plus they’ll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from millennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their anatomy will feature sexplosive devices…They’ll offer us quadruple-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat silky fellatio, deliriously gentle kissing, transcendent nipple tweaking, g-spot massage & prostate milking dexterity, plus 2,000 varieties of coital rhythm with scented lubes“…
Is it just me, or does this one-handed typist sound badly in need of a girlfriend?
The inevitable result of busybody laws which treat women as helpless victims of male sexuality:
[Toronto] City council…adopted…changes to…regulations…Now…strippers can’t sit on patrons’ laps or make contact with breasts, buttocks or pubic areas. And rooms, booths or cubicles for private dances have to be transparent on one side…As the Licensing and Standards Committee was formulating the amendments…its staff consulted with us…but…management at the club I worked in…[collected the surveys] and [filled] them out on our behalf. The manager told me…“This has nothing to do with what you think they want…They want the girls to see all these stupid questions so they can answer, ‘Oh, people touching me…Oh, I don’t like the dark.’ Then they come in the court and say, ‘Look, the girls don’t like the business’”…The city’s data shows that 98 per cent of respondents in the surveys submitted by the [club owner’s association] denied ever being sexually assaulted or touched without their consent, while 67 per cent of strippers who submitted surveys themselves said they had been…
If governments didn’t persecute adult businesses, managers would have no cause to worry and standards could be determined by the sex workers’ needs rather than those of the managers or prohibitionists, who both use the women as pawns in their power game.
Quote from the snake catcher himself on a snake expert’s message board: “Sorry but this is ridiculous, I was the one who caught this snake, never did I say anything like that, in fact I stressed to her that it was incredibly unusual for that to happen and quietly doubted it even occurred as she told it.”
Burlesque as a hobby is less stigmatized than professional stripping, Portland, Maine is unusually tolerant, and a seat on the school board isn’t exactly high office, but it’s still amazing this happened at all: “…Holly Seeliger, a 26-year-old teacher and burlesque dancer, won the District 2 seat on the Portland Board of Public Education, getting 59 percent of the vote…”
Metaupdates
No Other Option (Updates Galore, Part One)
Rachel Wotton’s wonderful charity “Touching Base”, which connects disabled people with sex workers who specialize in helping them, has experienced an upsurge of publicity due in part to the documentary Scarlet Road and in part to the movie The Sessions, which I’ll be discussing in a column two weeks from now. I hope this sympathetic and respectful article in The Age calls even more attention to it, and that one day the US may grow up enough for a branch of the organization to operate here.
Douglas Fox of Harlot’s Parlour shared an essay written by a male escort named Steve, which demonstrates how governments can ruin a simple idea used effectively by individuals and peer groups for decades:
There’s been a lot of hype about the Nationwide Ugly Mugs Scheme [but it’s useless to most sex workers]…Take…[this] recent…complaint [from] a male sex worker who didn’t get paid by a client who was drunk and told him he kept a knife [nearby]…Extracts from the warning read: “business was agreed to take place at the man’s home which was a flat in a communal block in Basildon…He is described as; 45-49, White, 5ft 9, stocky, shaven grey/white hair, blue eyes and pale complexion, with a local accent and scars to his torso”…No address, no phone number, nothing. Sex workers…need to access real information if we are to protect ourselves. Phone numbers…that look like…“0*********1″ do nothing to help…there are probably about 200 similar blocks of flats in Basildon…[and] the description sounds like every other client who has walked through my door in the last two weeks…
The organization which administers the NUM project made this (typically political) response.
The Australian government has axed its “Cleanfeed” porn-filtering plan that’s been shrouded in a campaign to fight spam and malware. Backers…pushed the idea for the last five years claiming that the Cleanfeed filter would protect children from predators…The filter even passed a government trial and was expected to be adopted… [but a backlash started] when a secret…Communications and Media Authority blacklist of targeted websites…was outed by Wikileaks…Cleanfeed was opposed by online consumers, lobby groups, ISPs, network administrators, some children’s welfare groups, Google, the U.S. Ambassador to Australia, and a number of government officials. Opponents…feared the filtering would foster Internet censorship and new online restrictions…
Apparently some Greek officials believe in “sex rays”, even if the people don’t:
…local officials insisted that a primary school return [brothel owner Soula Alevridou’s] donation…[of] €3,000 to cover the costs of [a] photocopier and a small library…the school was grateful…[but officials were embarrassed by] a brothel madam stepping into a gap created by fiscal recklessness and state profligacy…”We must protect our children,” [said provincial director of education Giorgos Panayiotopoulos]…
This Week in 2010 and 2011
I presented biographies of Mata Hari and Veronica Franco, looked at whore-hatred in World War II France, contemporary Iceland and a fictional future, and examined the truth about federal “sex trafficking” stings, the use of “Swedish model” rhetoric in American police departments, the campaign against Backpage and a fake escort blogger. I also discussed cops who rape, the increasing number of academics telling the truth about sex work, the reason sex worker rights have languished while gay rights thrived, and the difference in sex work news stories between Europe and the US, and featured short items on internet censorship, the government’s intentional hiding of information on “missing children”, the underuse of HPV vaccines, weird search terms, a murderous proposal and “don’t panic” plans.
The Pygmalion Fallacy:
Assuming that sex robots could be made that are indeed indistinguishable from real humans, I would foresee them causing more mental problems than solving them.
Especially once they start fighting for their rights.
How about child robots for pedophiles? Keep them away from the real children?
All I can say is once they are fully functional the birth rate in Japan is going to drop to zero overnight.
Or the unpleasant job of gestating and bearing children will be robotized too.
I don’t get it – how does the “fetal testosterone” story qualify as a “dog bites man”?
I did not know this. Never had a clue on what impact a mother’s testosterone might have on her male offspring. Now I’m wondering what kind of impact it has on her female offspring.
I still want to know more about this. My ring finger is substantially longer than my index finger and I’m hopelessly addicted to dangerous activities. So I get this from my mother?
When I LOOK at her – I really don’t see a high testosterone woman. I know all her male relatives were high-test guys … fuckin’ brutes they were – they terrified me at family gatherings when I was a kid. Too bad they’re mostly all dead now – I think I’m bigger now than they were! LOL
Fetal testosterone level does not depend on the mother’s testosterone level; it’s the testosterone level in the uterine environment, which does not affect the mother’s own testosterone levels. The reason it’s “dog bites man” is because the whole gist of the study is basically “testosterone level affects male personality development”. Gee, whooda thunkit?
Hmmm … well, I know quite a bit about testosterone and how it’s regulated in men. I know nothing of test in women though. In fact, women ask me for advice all the time on how to get in shape, or put on more muscle, or lose weight and I just tell them I’m unqualified to give advice because, as a male, I lean on test to put on muscle and lose fat – and women don’t have that as an advantage. They have to use other methods I’m not familiar with.
I’ll be looking into this though now because I don’t understand how a woman of “normal” testosterone levels could also have “up-regulated” test in the uterine enviro of her fetus. There must be a mechanism for this.
“She’s writing a book called When Someone You Love is A Sex Worker, which is intended to support family members and partners,”
What if this read:
“She’s writing a book called When Someone You Love is An Accountant, which is intended to support family members and partners,”
We’ll have reached an enlightened state when people see sex work as a job, not some mystical thing.
Stacy Swimme and Holly Seeliger are HOT! OK, not the most important thing about either of them. But worth mentioning.
What happened to Mah Gul is horrible. Yes, THAT’S an assault, not me saying that Swimme and Seeliger are hot.
Are we told what sort of “child pornography” Mangione possessed? Yes, he’s a hypocrite, but the images may have been the same sort of thing the lawyer is paying out 300 Gs for. And of course, it could be the most depraved stuff, featuring the real abuse of real children. The way this stuff is written about, we often don’t know.
Now watch: it’ll turn out the story made this clear, and I just missed it.
I don’t believe that even spectacularly good sex, with a human being or a robot, is the secret to longevity. Sex is wonderful stuff, but it isn’t magic. Not outside my D&D campaign.
Grace Bellavue is another babe. The pic on this article has her face, which is blurred on her own site. I’m glad that she and her folks were able to reconcile.
I’m tempted to ask you, “So, how do strippers feel about being touched by the men they dance for?” But of course the answer would be, “Depends on the stripper” because strippers are people and people don’t all feel the same way about, well, much of anything.
The news that child advocacy groups are opposing censorship give me a feeling that is warm and mushy. Like oatmeal. The lumps are that it’s only a few, but I’ll take it.
”We must protect our children” from WHAT, exactly? Was the donation conditional on the kids helping out at the brothel? No? Then chant a prayer over the money and buy the frickin’ books.
I, too, hope that some day a branch of Touching Base can operate in the US.
I have male friends who claim they haven’t had sex with their wives in … well, in one case – SEVEN years! These wives look old – they don’t look good at all and the husbands in some cases look just as unhealthy.
Flip that around … my wife is 54 and still looks great even though she doesn’t work out that much – but we always made a point of having sex at least three times a week (except for a couple of years there after menapause – where her libido tanked totally … which I think she’s coming out of now because we’re back to three a week). All my friends in their 50’s who look good – have a lot of sex.
Now – is it the sex that keeps these people looking young? Or is it the young that keeps these people having sex? I don’t know.
I don’t doubt that an active sex life is correlated with health, even longevity in the sense that most people talk about longevity. It’s like a balanced diet and regular exercise: it helps you reach that three-score and ten, or even that century mark. But it doesn’t provide the sort of healthy “longevity” transhumanists mean when they use that word. What the transhumanists mean are lifespans of well over a hundred years, and a level of health in those later years which is equal to or better than that enjoyed by the middle-aged today. Sex might help, and it’s certainly something youthful centenarians will want to do, but again, I doubt you can have enough sex or good enough sex, even with a superhuman sex-bot, to break the 120 mark and still be thinking, “You know, I could do a marathon if I buckled down and trained for it.”
My own sex life has revved up a bit in the last year or two, and I’m losing weight. Now, I can’t attribute this to calories burned up during sex (I’m not having that much), but maybe I’m better adjusted, hormones in better balance, not engaging in as much nervous, angry, or sad eating? Quite possible. Of course, a single anecdote which is also a mere correlation (I’m having more sex AND I’m losing weight) is hardly proof. I might be losing weight for reasons that have nothing to do with sex. But hey, it isn’t making me fatter!
I think you are definitely right on all points here.
On your own personal experience – I can tell you that a lot of men don’t really realize that it’s their endocrine system that, when properly recruited, will help them shed fat like nothing else. Sex, even a modest amount – does increase testosterone. Another thing that will do it is lifting heavy in the gym. My favorite workout is five sets of deadlifting 450 pounds – only 5 reps per set with a 3-5 minute pause between sets. It’s excruciating but about 4 hours afterwards the hormonal response kicks in and … I’ve had to call my wife at work and tell her to take off and meet me for lunch because I’m on fire!
So that’s why that happens. I always just assumed it was the physically fit, scantily clad women bending over grunting everywhere.
I have been lifting dumbbells, but it’s light weight and lots of reps. I do some chin-ups, and this week can’t do as many as before. I think I’ll go in for a check-up as soon as I can. I want the doctor to look at my right shoulder anyway.
You have an appointment at the clinic very soon which I’ll be reminding you of…smile.
I need your reminders more than ever, now that Brandy’s gone. I sure miss Brandy.
Brandy’s a fine girl; what a good wife she would be.
1 of my favorite 1 hit wonders…smile.
She’s a NAG! Then again, that’s why I downloaded her. I haven’t been able to get her to work with Windows 7. 🙁
Re: All in the Family
Whenever I’m discussing sex work/workers with either non-libertarians or people for whom sex work isn’t something they think about with any frequency, I try to frame it as just another mundane business transaction. Some people get it, but most can’t past their prior feelies on the subject (see tweet to radio show, and response from another listener, below).
http://tinyurl.com/cljgrkq
Celebrity Dr. Michael Roizen, founder of RealAge.com, frequent Oprah guest and chair of Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute, claims 4-8 years of additional life can be garnered if we have 350-700 orgasms per year
This:
Ernest Borgnine is keeping busy – masturbating. The 91-year-old legend appeared on Fox & Friends to promote his book and was asked his secret to longevity. He leaned in and whispered (easily heard over the microphone) “I masturbate a lot.” The hosts were in hysterics, rightly.
And I can’t let the opportunity pass without a Joss Whedon reference to Borgnine.
Rebecca: Suddenly, I’m nobody again.
Angel: Not according to these.
Rebecca: According to those, I’ve slept with Ernest Borgnine. And I’m bulimic.
Angel: I hear Borgnine’s a very skilled lover.
And it can’t be an accident that there was a prominent character in a Star Trek series, a Borg seven of nine.
(Is this what they call confirmation bias? Or pareidolia?)
OK guys, I’m starting to reconsider. Bring on the sexbots!
[new word for today: pareidolia]
Sailor,
I had to look the word up. I knew the phenomenom I was looking for – seeing patterns where there weren’t any – and I couldn’t remember the word so I just put the definition into google and Viola, er, I mean Voila! there it was!
So basically, you’re using up 4-8 years of life when you’re young in having sex, and getting it back at the end of your life when you’re old? That does not sound like a bargain to me. There are many good reasons for having sex, but some ridiculous plan for “enjoying” a few extra years of decrepitude and senescence is not one of them.
Furthermore, the idea of turning orgasms into something to be counted (and thus fretted over) for imaginary “health benefits” has all the appeal of a “nutrition information” label. It reminds me of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin’s father explains that adults can’t enjoy anything like a bike ride unless they ruin it by turning it into a math exercise.
Well, I don’t know how decrepit Borgnine was. He seemed pretty spry in the interview. Of course, I don’t know – maybe we need a clinical trial on masturbation? 😉
But I was actually playing the Borgnine thing for laughs. And the last few paragraphs of the sex-bot seemed to be doing the same.
Doesn’t sound that good to me, either. But where did this come from? If you lose six years from your youth and get it back when you’re old, doesn’t that mean you live the same number of years either way? You wouldn’t even have the benefit of extra years. Again, I seem to be missing something.
This is happening to me more and more the past couple of weeks. I think I must be stressing over something, not getting enough sleep (this is pretty common for me), something.
350-700 orgasms a year for, let’s call it 50 years? That’s got to use up at least 4-8 years of time altogether, wouldn’t you say? Even more so when one counts the work time needed to get the money to pay for all that.
700 would be two “tosses” a day. That’s peanuts for Krulac when he was 17 … a nigh impossible feat though at almost 51.
I don’t think all this “tossing” is a good thing. I don’t think they “tossed” that much back in the old days and that’s one reason (I think) that a lot of young men experience ED these days.
Mr. Purple Helmeted Soldier is not a Guitar – he doesn’t get better with age. 🙁
I think you might be overestimating the time requirements. 700 a year over 50 years would be 35k; if each one took an hour that would be 4 years. I don’t know how many people orgasm for an hour (or take that long to get there if they really want to) but it probably isn’t many.
So, you’re assuming that everyone can get sex on demand without having to look for it, pay for it or work for the money to pay for it? I beg to differ. Sex often represents an investment of much more time than it takes to actually complete the physical act.
Except he (Dr. Michael Roizen) didn’t say “sex”, he said “orgasm.” And he (Ernest Borgnine) specifically talked about masturbating.
If masturbation orgasms (or any other kind) really “extended life”, the average man should outlive the average woman by years, when in fact the opposite is true. Sorry, no sale. I find this idea exactly as believable as I find the notion that wasting one’s life making numerological calculations about food and/or eating magical plants can extend old age by a few years. Whenever I hear these fools prattling about it I think of J.I. Rodale, who dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of 72 while appearing on The Dick Cavett Show, minutes after insisting that eating liver broiled in urine would help him live to 100.
I didn’t say that I believe the underlying premise, only that your math was unrealistic.
No more unrealistic than the premise. If one allows the existence of demons, it’s pretty absurd to disallow the existence of charms that protect one from demons.
Maybe men would die sooner if they didn’t masturbate. 😉
I have to say that in the GB Shaw approach to virtue, that if one eats liver boiled in urine, there really ought to be some virtuous outcome for such a distasteful practice.
(Shaw’s point was that if the hangover preceded the drinking, then getting drunk would be moral. I think it was tongue in cheek.
I think that having an average of two orgasms a day for the first fifty years of my life sounds rather nice, whether or not it causes me to live any longer.
when i hear about morality from people who have stolen millions worth of public money,dont pay taxes and have bank accounts in Switzerland it drives me positively insane.such people have no right to speak about morality and if ever heard from my hypothetical child that they want to be like them,i would seriously wonder what i had done wrong,much more so than if they told me they want to become like Alevridou.the kids needed this money and i guarantee you most working class greek people appreciate Soula a lot more than they do men like Panayiotopoulos and they consider whores to be a lot more moral than politicians and their likes.i put an emphasis on the working class people,though.
about the article about the sex worker who came out to her parents,i thought the comments would be a lot worse.at least some were supportive.although,i feel like asking some of theese people where do they get their stats from about the percentage of maladjusted sex workers and conclude that shes lying.even if they know some sex workers who happen to be maladjusted dont they think that a sex worker would know more about her colleagues than they do,because she has actually met more of them?
about the portland maine article,i have been to portland,since i have relatives there.it is a fairly open minded city with tons of strip clubs full of punk type girls.my goth cousin invited me to one,called devils point and the girls were amazingly talented gymnasts/dancers who should get more recognition for what they do.thats why it is surprising to me,too to see such attitutides expressed in that article,since it seems that the far more stigmatised brand of stripping has many female fans and is more accepted there as well.although,if they also make the point that if a strip club dancer would be forced to resign,why should it be different for a burlesque dancer,ill have to agree.of course,none should be forced to resign,but if a girl from devils point was in that position and instead of support,like the burlesque dancer got, got mostly shit i would find it infuriating.
Thank you for the linkage, Maggie!
the judges ruled that there really is such a thing as sympathetic magic, so that altering the images of children actually and literally harmed them in some tangible way. So much for science, logic or common sense.
If so, I have some work to do! Heh.
Re: sex robots. People who think sex robot sex will be better than human sex don’t really understand sex or the erotic arts at all. You can have all sorts of learnin’ but what makes sex great is the interpersonal reaction and what you do in the moment. Not a pre-programmed bag o’ tricks.
There are two kinds of people, it seems to me, who are into the whole sex robot thing. The first group are AI fetishists, who foresee a future are artificial people who really are indistinguishable mentally from normal humans. This has been part of science fiction for a long time and is pretty much a harmless fantasy.
The second group of people are people who just don’t seem to understand sex at all. (Which I don’t really understand. How can someone be that disconnected from their own sex drive?) People want to have sex with other people. Sex with a robot that isn’t believably human would just be a form of masturbation. People want the mental reactions from the person they are having sex with, the believable physical feeling, the pulse of life.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who like to say that there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.
[…] to stop people from seeking out avenues of pleasure by banning them. After five years of trying, Australia gave up its plans for a national porn filter last November; even the notoriously-puritanical United States seems to recognize that putting the djinni back […]