The big story right now is of course the COVID-19 virus, and in addition to all the events and crowd-based businesses either shutting themselves down or being forced to shut down by governments, there’s lots of talk of practicing “social distancing”, in other words physically distancing oneself from other people in order to reduce the risk of transmission. Naturally, this is emboldening all the puritans to declare that this aspect of the epidemic is a good thing, because touching other people is sinful unsanitary anyhow; it’s also inspiring a great deal of talk about “paid sick leave”, which totally ignores the 8% of Americans who own their own small businesses (including many sex workers) and the 10% of Americans who work as independent contractors (including most of the sex workers who don’t fall into the other category). When people stay away from small businesses (or the government forces them to shut) for more than a few days, you know what often happens? They go out of business. And when there’s no work for independent contractors for similar reasons, you know what happens? Their bills don’t get paid. And I guarantee you there won’t be any “bailouts” for them, either, unlike big fascist banks and manufacturing concerns. For sex workers who have already endured over a decade of persecution and two years of actual censorship, not to mention repeated attempts to choke off our income and steal our bank accounts, and who are now at the beginning of a hotly-contested presidential election year (which is always bad for business), this could not possibly have come at a worse time. Some will try to get square jobs (assuming they can pass dystopian “background checks”), while others will attempt to switch to camming and other no-physical-contact sex work, a market which is already completely saturated due to full-service workers shifting to it to escape the aforementioned persecution and censorship. But many others will simply grow more desperate, while sociopaths try to take advantage of them by haggling their prices down or demanding unprotected intercourse.
Whenever women talk about awful male behavior within earshot of men, they are sure to be accosted by weenies making the wholly unnecessary assertion that “Not all men…” blahbitty blah blah blah. Well, dudes, now is your chance to prove that you’re one of the “nice guys” y’all insist are the rule rather than the exception. If you’ve cancelled a session with a sex worker because you’re engaging in “social distancing”, how about sending her the money anyhow? If you’ve got the money to buy sex from her, you have the money to help her in a time of need. Or how about asking your favorites if they offer phone sex or Skype sessions so you can do business with each other despite “distancing”? If you absolutely must have tit for tat, how about scheduling a session for sometime in April and paying in advance? And if you have a sugar arrangement, maybe it’s time to give your sugar baby a raise. (I’m not even going to try to appeal to self-appointed “rescuers” because we all know they’re pathological liars crammed as full of shit as a backed-up sewer line, and their idea of “rescue” is rape followed by confinement in cages or sweatshops.)
This is going to be an incredibly bad year for a very large fraction of sex workers, at least as bad as ’08 and possibly worse; if you profess to care about women, and you’re not one of those contractors or small business owners who are in the soup with us, now is the time to put your money where your mouth is. The only upside to this mess that I can see is that it seems to have at least temporarily supplanted “sex trafficking” hysteria in the media, and bourgeois white women are too busy shopping for cases of hand sanitizer to accuse random brown people (or the drivers of white vans) of being “traffickers”. But even if this really is a sign of the end of that long moral panic, sex workers need to make it through the year financially before they can enjoy the respite.
