Last week was another busy one, both in sex work and in activism; the interviews I linked appear to have boosted my signal somewhat, as did my picking a fight with a presidential candidate (to which, I’m sorry to say, he failed to respond). That’s just one example of how I’ve been getting bolder on Twitter lately; between suffering fools less patiently than before, to tweeting more risqué pictures, to more openly tweeting links to my escort website and advertising, to more openly referring to my work in real time (in other words, essentially saying “I just had sex for money” or “I’m about to have sex for money right now“), I’ve pretty much opened the throttle on harlotry. And it seems to be having the desired effect; at this rate I should break 10,000 followers by the end of the year, and that will expand my social media reach considerably. When I release my next books (and I’ve been gearing up to work on them again at last) I’ll have a far larger potential audience than I did two years ago, and that means my message that sex workers are complex three-dimensional people (rather than cardboard “victim” cutouts) will be that much louder. Nor am I the only one; my friends Mistress Matisse, Savannah Sly, Tara Burns, Laura Lee and others are being quoted in the mainstream media so often now, the week doesn’t pass that one can’t see one or the other of us (and often more than one) in a news article. Our clout has increased so dramatically that at least one news outlet will interview sex workers for any given story involving sex work (a big change from even three years ago), and anyone foolish enough to start an anti-sex worker hashtag on Twitter will soon find us claiming it for ourselves by, as Matisse put it, “pissing all over it“. Whores aren’t going to stay quiet and roll over for the cops and other busybodies any more; we are coming to claim our rights. And there’s not a damned thing prohibitionists, with all their ridiculous fantasies of “eradicating” us, can do to stop it.
Diary #292
February 1, 2016 by Maggie McNeill
Posted in Diary | Tagged activism, blogging, internet, Maggie in the Media, Twitter | 7 Comments
7 Responses
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Come on Maggie be bold, come right out with it and say what you mean, don’t be all shy and hang back….!
xx
I guess I’m just behind the times when it comes to social media’s impact, but how much effect did that tweet really have? Looking at that link it doesn’t look like Mr. Sanders responded. Not that it surprises me, but how can there be a fight if one party doesn’t participate?
I wonder what would happen if the next time Sanders comes to Seattle the sex workers take his microphone as those Black Lives Matter activists did a few months ago?
(Full disclosure: I do find myself partial to some of Sanders’ positions on other issues.)
When confronting a politician, “authority” or True Believer, one isn’t aiming to get that person to change his thinking, because he won’t; his positions are not derived at by thought, but by some other means such as expediency or emotion. One aims to influence the undecided in the audience.
Although maybe if a bunch of sex workers crashed one of his rallies the way Black Lives Matter did…
In that case, hopefully we can look forward to the day when Mr. Sanders (or Trump, or Cruz, or Mrs. Clinton, etc.) feel obliged to respond to your tweets instead of the reverse.
“One aims to influence the undecided in the audience.”
To what end or course of action? Further, I wonder how many truly ‘undecided’s are left in this partisan country of ours. For example, my position used to be the default one of ‘prostitution is bad’ until I came upon this blog and my mind was changed. Granted, perhaps I was more susceptible to it being changed than a true believer.
On a somewhat related note, I’d be curious what the reaction of the sex worker community and their allies is to the recent happenings out in rural Oregon…
As for the fools, they are always with us, aren’t they? Why suffer them at all if we cannot be patient with them? If they are incapable of changing their minds, wouldn’t telling them to ‘go away’ or ‘STFU’ just incite them to further annoyance and badgering (or worse)? Don’t they feed on the adverse reactions they get out of people?
I fear that tweeting your adventures in real-time is only going to get you easily arrested. Is it your ambition to become a martyr?
Not remotely. In fact, I feel that one of the reasons we’ve been such easy pickings for so long is that we’ve unintentionally been complicit with the cops by staying quiet.